NixOS for me. It’s a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there’s also an entire distro based on it.
Yeah I’ve gotten into Nix recently and it’s slowly been taking everything over bit by bit. So now I have the standalone package manager when I’m on WSL or other distros, full NixOS on a couple machines, fully reproducible LXC containers for my Proxmox build, the list goes on and on! Hell, I’ve got it on my steam deck to manage my CLI apps just because I can lol
Hahaha same on the distcc cluster. It was a rare proud moment for me many years ago. I rememeber when I got the cross compiling working it felt like magic. Good times.
I’m enjoying what Nix does. That said, the learning curve is very steep, and the documentation is very inconsistent and usually poor.
The repositories for both nixpkgs and nixos are absolutely colossal, which is a huge plus, but their configurations are not listed on the same page, and it can lead to a lot of confusion. Unlike Arch’s PKGBUILD, which practically tell the build system exactly what to do, you’ll have to learn the structure of current configuration files, or the more recent flake system, to setup things how you like.
I recently had the same thoughts but was Ted to try nonetheless. Asked for some beginner friendly resources here on lemmy a little while back. Might be to further help for some 😊
Its actually not that bad. A few google searches on how to setup config files and going to search.nixos.org/packages to show you what info to fill in in the NixOS configuration is all you do.
And, even more importantly, search.nixos.org/options to figure out which options to set. Always search for options first. “Installing” something by just adding the package to systemPackages etc. is usually the correct thing to do for end-user applications but not for “system things” such as services.
Do you mean search.nixos.org/packagesBecause that has config info on the page of the listed package. Unless I am misunderstanding what you meant by their configurations?
That’s technically correct. The “NixOS configuration” tab is sufficient to just install something, however out of ever package I’ve personally used, none of them have listed the available options there. For example: this theme, and what the extra options are
I’m trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a few personal servers as I wait for Slowroll, I want to get back to trying to get Gentoo running, and I should check out Guix as a server in a VM.
Gentoo having a binary option should help since I seem to mess up the kernel part of the installation.
dist-kernel for gentoo is even better. Kernel from source but the distribution give a config that works for most. Then if you still want to change something you can patch it. It is wonderful.
If we allow derivatives, I’d say SteamOS despite being Arch. It’s putting Linux in non-technical people’s literal hands and it’s not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It’s almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I’ve seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It’s been a really long time since we’ve last seen a fundamentally different distro that’s got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they’re still very package oriented. We’ve been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It’s incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they’re atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.
Gentoo for the documentation, but for a modern comp with bad bootloader implementation, Fedora’s anaconda system for the secure boot shim is irreplaceable and my daily. I won’t consider any distro without a shim and clear guide for UEFI secure boot keys. In that vain, Gentoo is the only doc source I know of that walks the user through booting into UEFI directly with Keytool.
Was scrolling through to see if anyone had mentioned void. I use Fedora these days but Void is great because of how easy it is to contribute to with its GitHub-based package management workflow - anyone can update a package or introduce a new one, it just needs to be approved. It doesn’t get any easier than that
I really enjoyed Solus Linux but the last I checked, it didn’t support something I need for my job. So, I do use Arch, but was completely smitten and impressed with their impressive boot speed. From pushing POST screen to desktop, it was something like 5 seconds. With Arch, after POST, maybe 10-15 seconds.
With their recent drama, it’s been a bit hard to see them struggle. They just did release a fresh build I read online, so they are still alive. :)
Add comment