Sometimes I get fed up with managing a whole system and once in a blue moon bricking my system on an update, but the alternatives are always worse, and with btrfs now, I don’t have to worry about the latter problem.
Nix was the closest to pulling me away. A centralized config? Beautiful. Static packages without dependency conflicts? Beautiful. Immutable applications? The WORST idea we’ve ever had as a community. Imo, VS Code extensions are fundamentally incompatible with Nix. I spent weeks trying to get it to work doing multiple different things to try and hope it would work. It can’t. VS Code just has to be mutable.
Anyway so I’m back to arch and have been for over a year since I tried Nix (and before that Fedora which has its own issues). Before that I had been on Arch for 4 years.
I think I’ll stay now. It’s really the best option out there. In my mind, Arch is Linux, i.e. it’s how an OS should be built for the Linux kernel and the FOSS ecosystem, and it won’t ever be beat
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop I tried arch and never looked back. In hindsight, backports are insanity and just always using upstream is obviously the way to go. As a bonus, I can actually understand how arch is constructed when I need to because the wiki is amazing
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop
How did you realize that? Hasn’t been my experience on Debian and Ubuntu at all, they always just worked for me, and that’s despite running a bunch of PPAs for GPU stuff on my Ubuntu install.
By ubuntu blowing up 3 times over a decade when I tried distro upgrade? Arch requires you to turn a wrench periodically, but keeping upgraded is nowhere as risky.
I think Nix is better used for things like servers instead of a daily driver PC. Having to fuck with config files for my laptop/desktop would be a nightmare that I refuse to go through. I’ve been playing with Nix on a home server and I’m loving it for that. With a limited scope on what actually needs to be installed it makes managing the configs possible.
For me, I always keep coming back to Arch tbh
Sometimes I get fed up with managing a whole system and once in a blue moon bricking my system on an update, but the alternatives are always worse, and with btrfs now, I don’t have to worry about the latter problem.
Nix was the closest to pulling me away. A centralized config? Beautiful. Static packages without dependency conflicts? Beautiful. Immutable applications? The WORST idea we’ve ever had as a community. Imo, VS Code extensions are fundamentally incompatible with Nix. I spent weeks trying to get it to work doing multiple different things to try and hope it would work. It can’t. VS Code just has to be mutable.
Anyway so I’m back to arch and have been for over a year since I tried Nix (and before that Fedora which has its own issues). Before that I had been on Arch for 4 years.
I think I’ll stay now. It’s really the best option out there. In my mind, Arch is Linux, i.e. it’s how an OS should be built for the Linux kernel and the FOSS ecosystem, and it won’t ever be beat
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop I tried arch and never looked back. In hindsight, backports are insanity and just always using upstream is obviously the way to go. As a bonus, I can actually understand how arch is constructed when I need to because the wiki is amazing
How did you realize that? Hasn’t been my experience on Debian and Ubuntu at all, they always just worked for me, and that’s despite running a bunch of PPAs for GPU stuff on my Ubuntu install.
By ubuntu blowing up 3 times over a decade when I tried distro upgrade? Arch requires you to turn a wrench periodically, but keeping upgraded is nowhere as risky.
But have you tried Gentoo?
I think Nix is better used for things like servers instead of a daily driver PC. Having to fuck with config files for my laptop/desktop would be a nightmare that I refuse to go through. I’ve been playing with Nix on a home server and I’m loving it for that. With a limited scope on what actually needs to be installed it makes managing the configs possible.