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So my hard drive failed, and I can't boot my distro anymore. Looks like a good time to try out something new.
I started with Mandrake, when it first came out, and I have used Ubuntu and Mint for many years now. I also tried Arch for some time, and also Puppy linux.
But I have an itch for NixOS. I think the universe is telling me to go for it.
The only thing that concerns me is that I don't have much time to spare, and I am not some linux guru either.
I think I could document my progress on the way in case anyone finds it helpfull, and or interesting.
Help or suggestions would be much appreciated.
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I've been using Guix System as my main OS for almost a decade now. I really enjoy the elegance of the declarative configuration model, and when my laptop finally kicked the can a few years ago, I was able to replicate it quickly on a new machine by just applying the same Guix System and Guix Home configurations to it.
A pretty great site to get started with Guix, Emacs, and all things Lisp is System Crafters. They have an active community and a nice collection of video tutorials and written guides to get you set up.
Good luck and happy hacking!
You should give Gentoo a go, it's the only distro I've managed to stick with. It seems a wee bit frightening if you only read about it, but you only need to follow the instructions in the handbook. My only tip is to make sure you install from a live USB like Linux Mint instead of the official image, makes for a nicer experience.
Happy computerizing :)
I tried NixOS but for desktop use, the declarative configuration is not worth the effort (at least for me).
I tried Void and I stuck with it. It is very stable, even if I update a machine with an old install it just works.
runit is very simple to use once you get it.
I finally settled on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and have been quite happy with it. It's got the benefit of being cutting-edge/rolling release, but has been better about stuff not randomly breaking (looking at you, Plasma on Arch).
Question: is this system your tool, does it have to work always? Or is it more of a toy, wasting considerable time and brain cycles along the way?
My answer: Debian stable for tools. Anything else for toys. :)
Well, the anything list has been shortened in the last 20 years of course. I wasted too much time on suse (sorry ~sherlock) and too many cpu cycles on gentoo. But it has always been interesting. alpinelinux is interesting for me. I did play with nix (the package manager) on a debian stable box a few weeks ago. But well, I ended with > 50000 files in /nix in no time. And who knows, where they come from? Are they signed? Do I get an error message if the signature can't be verified? Hmmmm. Toy? Maybe. Tool? Nope. Then I'd prefer compiling from source.
Not a fan of Nixos. More a fan of slax or suse.
Nixos is actually very good if you have a bit of patience with it. As everything is containerised, nothing fails in the system if you figure it out.