Nixos.
The ability to have my whole system in a git repo is what i have been looking for when i did not know it.
Steep freaking curve though and the documentation kinda blows. But its the distro ive spent the longest on apart from Arch, and i feel quote at home even though most stuff is done differently.
I did some research on guix when i was deciding which one of the two i was going to try as a daily driver.
My conclusion was that choosing guix would mean choosing a smaller community and amount of support for a better language.
Would love your opinion if youve done your research on it. Why choose guix over nixos?
Debain on servers because it just works.
Arch on desktops because you got basically every software package you’d ever need in the AUR and it’s somewhat stable.
Arch because I’m too lazy for a non-rolling distro. I should really set up snapshots and my dotfiles repo on my new laptop though (:
Fedora Kinoite because it doesnt suck and doesnt break. Actually switched to ublue kinoite main, very close to upstream with minimal changes that always stay the same (its always the same difference, not weirdly diverging more and more from upstream).
But I dont know if it is the best model, as Fedoras BTRFS snapshots + ostree without the image based thing would sound better ? But this is not existing.
Btw Nix, Flatpak, Distrobox/Toolbox, Distrobox/Toolbox with root, Podman, Docker, layering, removal, are all things that work on Fedora Atomic. Maybe even snap if someone is brave enough to try
I use Guix. It’s fully free, it’s basically the de-facto GNU system, and I like the features of the Guix package manager.
How is the experience? Packages, updates, desktops, flatpak, podman etc? Nowadays most apps work everywhere but the core is different
I’ve not been running it for very long, so I can’t comment in depth. But, installing packages is easy (guix install), updates are quite easy (guix pull && guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm) (but it is an unstable rolling distribution so sometimes updates need to be pushed along with --keep-going if they fail). I’m using EXWM so I can’t really comment on DEs but it has Plasma, Gnome, XFCE and a few others so it can be quite familiar.
A nice thing about updates is that you can very easily roll back to a previous point in GRUB. Whenever you run system reconfigure it puts a new point in that menu.
I haven’t used Flatpak so I can’t comment.
The only thing that might be annoying to some people is the kernel it uses by default. The mainline Linux kernel, which for some reason permits proprietary blobs, is not used. Linux-libre is used, which kicks them out. Which means if you don’t have hardware that has been fully freed, you’ll have problems.
I believe mainline Linux can be installed by changing some things in the system config and adding an extra repository, but it’ll build by source instead (since Guix is a build-from-sourve distribution with transparent binary substitution where they are available). And of course, then you’ll make the de-facto GNU system run proprietary software. Which is certainly an odd thing to do, but if your hardware requires blobs to run then you unfortunately don’t really have much of a choice.
Oh, and that’s another point. You configure pretty much everything in config.scm. Users, kernel arguments, etc.
You can also use the GNU Hurd kernel if you want, but unless you have very specific hardware it won’t work because of the lack of drivers so for most people right now that’s meaningless.
It’s not really a distribution friendly to new users, but I’d love to see it succeed. Maybe I’ll write a nice installer and package manager GUI for it in the future?
Damn that sounds great! Build from source when needed too, this means everything will just run?
I am curious about using the linux libre kernel, as modern hardware doesnt often even support / has a ported to coreboot.
I have a Clevo NV41MZ next to me and I will soooon coreboot it. Also a Thinkpad T430. One will get Nitrokeys heads (as it seems to be updated better, or I should just compile heads) and the other one Dasharo.
But these firmwares both require blobs, still wayy better than proprietary firmware, but just to see how crazy this is, all these machines everyone uses are proprietary unupdated garbage.
Really curious about Guix, want to try it out. I really like Flatpaks now as I am on Fedora Kinoite, so nearly every distro will just work for me as long as its modern and has Wayland and systemd I guess
