My understanding as a NixOS user is a lot of its fundamentals are very strongly coupled to systemd. It’s responsible for things like running system activation scripts and managing any services it exposes options to, so replacing it sounds like a tall order.
I’m not aware of any Nix-based alternatives, but I’d definitely welcome them! Oh and also, as others have pointed out, Guix might fit the bill depending on your needs.
Since you want a just works deal, I’d go with a ublue based immutable distro, my favorite is Bazzite. You can pick between KDE and Gnome, and change between them cleanly at any point. User apps auto update in the background, your system also updates while it’s running and you only need to reboot to apply. If anything ever goes wrong, you have painless rollbacks. All that with up-to-date fedora packages and kernel.
I’ve been running it on my deck for a while now and it’s never let me down so far, really pleasant experience. It generally keeps out of your way and takes care of the chores while still allowing you to mess around if you want.
My situation is remarkably similar to yours down to the language, and I happen to have been considering a US keyboard as well so that’s disheartening to hear. I have nothing to add right now but will let you know if I come across anything helpful!
Others have brought up open source solutions already so on a different note I’ll say I’ve used the (closed source and paid) Insync client successfully in the past, and it worked fine. An interesting bonus is you can have it on both Windows and Linux pointing to the same set of files if you dual boot and it’s supposed to work just fine.
I can see why it’d be divisive with topre keys, no key markings and a pretty non standard layout but man does it look nice. Really appreciate what they’re going for there.
Anyway, thanks and hope you find a solution, I’ll drop by if I come across anything useful!
Right, that all makes sense. I’ll definitely keep that .XCompose file in mind, wasn’t aware it even was a thing before your post. Also, do you mind sharing the specific keyboard you’re using for reference?
Side note, I’ve started using vim/helix a few months ago and the pt layout makes things a lot more awkward than I expected, that’s half the reason I’m considering a US keyboard lol
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
That’s a great idea, I’d absolutely love it myself. Something like adding a flake input and it giving you an overlay with reproducible packages for a lot of games, I suppose. Not sure about feasibility but it sure sounds enticing!
Your average user probably wouldn’t be too thrilled about it, but I’m sure Nix nerds would be all over it lol.
That was one of the most unhinged rabbit holes I’ve been to in a hot second, and I absolutely mean that in the best of ways. Well done and congrats on getting there after everything was said and done!
I’ve been meaning to experiment with mobile NixOS myself but it’s all but impossible to get my hands on a supported device around here. Then again, maybe fumbling around and trying to get it to work at all on an old phone might be fun 🤔
Pretty much, yeah. At some point I remember the recommendation being having a separate /boot as well due to incompatibilities with GRUB’s save default option iirc, not sure that’s a thing anymore.
Anyway, you usually set that up during the install process, although I’m not sure graphical installers let you handcraft btrfs subvolume mount points or even select them as such these days. Last I checked at least they either just used a default layout (@ and @home with Ubuntu, for instance) or treated it as a single volume with no further options.
Yup, I feel you. It’s something I’ve always wanted myself, and I find myself hoping the OSS alternatives eventually implement something similar. For now I just make do with things like tealdeer and whatnot.
Edit: Just stumbled upon navi, the interactivity looks a lot closer to what we want than tldr and friends at least
They do have Linux and Windows versions coming and claim they’re going to gradually open source it so there’s that, but yeah, doesn’t exactly inspire that much confidence lol