As someone from a developing country, I’m painfully aware of how most big publishers choose to ignore recommended prices and just go with a straight USD conversion most of the time so I can only hope this doesn’t screw them even further.
I really wish it was viable for Valve to enforce a ceiling on suggested prices or something along those lines, it’s about the only way I see that ever changing. Well, that, or everyone just becoming a full-time sailor, I suppose!
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
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.
As a recent NixOS convert coming from Bazzite (Kinoite/Silverblue with user friendly daily driver and gaming tweaks), and before that mostly Arch-based distros, I’d say it boils down to the tradeoff between having way more control over reproducibility and having to deep dive into the often poorly documented domain specific rabbit hole that is Nix. If you’re comfortable with going out of your way to learn, looking for examples, reading source code to find out what options you can use or how stuff works, it can absolutely be worth it but it’s a steep price to pay for sure.
I personally adore what Nix sets out to solve and find it extremely rewarding to learn. Plus, as a developer, I enjoy puzzling out how to get stuff done and don’t mind diving into the source if I need to, so it works for me. I’d absolutely prefer solid documentation, of course, but it’s not a deal breaker.
When it comes to software, the Nix repo has a staggering amount of prebuilt binaries ready to download (which you can search here) and it’s often not too hard to hack together your own reproducible package if you want after you get comfortable enough with it. At least for my use cases, I haven’t really missed much from my days using Arch and the AUR. If anything, I appreciate how much more consistent it tends to be in comparison.
If you, like myself, go for a flake (yet another rabbit hole within a rabbit hole) based setup and point to the unstable repo, you basically get a fully reproducible, easy to update and rollback rolling release not too dissimilar to using Arch with auto btrfs snapshots enabled. That’s how I used to do Arch and it feels pretty familiar.
Anyway, that’s what I got. If you have any more specific concerns or questions I’d be happy to elaborate!
Edit: I forgot to add but I find a nice way to get comfortable without fully commiting is using Nix as a package manager on any old distro. You could install it on Endeavour (I recommend this method) and play around with Home Manager, use it as a dotfiles manager on steroids, have it declaratively install and manage the CLI apps you can’t live without and whatnot, see how you like it. That’s how I started, I have a common HM config I’ve so far used with Debian at work, Ubuntu running under WSL when I’m on Windows and now NixOS itself.
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.
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.
To add to this, another viable path is using Nix, the package manager, on its own. That way you can get Home Manager to manage your applications and dotfiles independently of your base system, as long as you are able to install Nix.
It’s my general workflow, run Determinate Nix Installer, install Home Manager, clone my config and I’m off to the races. Been sharing that config between Debian, Ubuntu on WSL and Bazzite for a while and it’s served me well so far.
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 🤔
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
I’ve been using it for several months by now, I keep everything synced with Syncthing and it’s been working really well. Android app is still rough around the edges but it does work alright.
My understanding is it was developed as an answer to Roam Research specifically, and while its model might not work for everyone, I love it.
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!
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.
Damn, I didn’t think to include SMR drives when it comes to bcachefs. Your whole comment made me appreciate the whole concept under a whole new light actually, thanks!