title, and to be clear I mean for my usecase specifically. Redhat is being absorbed into IBM and i’m a little worried about how that might affect the fedora project. I’m aware that they’ve been owned by IBM for a while but we are seeing all the typical signs of a company about to go to shit thanks to bad management. I am looking into and preparing to switch in case the fedora project is messed up as well.

I use my pc mainly for gaming (so steam is required) and stuff in my browser and I have a gtx 1650 (can’t get new stuff bc i’m broke) so although I don’t need the proprietary drivers necessarily, I prefer them. I use KDE with a handful of kwin scripts (like temp virtual desktops and karousel) and some cosmetic stuff like klassy, better blur, and a custom color scheme. I need all of that to remain possible. I currently use fedora kde edition, but I have been looking into immutable distros because I don’t know what I’m doing and I want to have a much lower chance of breaking stuff (or at least a way to easily unbreak it). I also want something at least reasonably up-to-date, because I like to get new features quickly. I don’t need to get them as fast as something like arch, but ubuntu and debian are way to slow for me.

what do y’all think would work best for me? I’ve looked at a few things but I haven’t been able to find anything but fedora that serves my usecase the way I want it to yet.

  • hallettj@leminal.spaceEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    I think there are arguments for NixOS for a casual user despite the learning curve reputation. But there are also downsides to consider.

    The pros:

    • There is a good, user-friendly installer that makes it easy to get a working system
    • From what I can see setting up KDE is pretty easy - there are configs online that you can paste into configuration.nix without modification
    • NixOS is good for gaming with proprietary drivers and Steam - again it’s a matter of pasting a few lines of configuration
    • Like with other distros it’s easy to recover if something breaks
    • Unlike with other immutable distros you get a lot of options for tinkering with your system, and experimenting. You can dip your toes into the advanced stuff, going from casual user to Linux expert at your own pace, with the safety line of being able to roll back changes at any time.
    • If you stick to the basics you can have a very stable, very update-to-date system without much difficulty.

    The cons:

    • To get the full safety of rolling back a previous point in time you need to ditch channels, and instead use pinned nixpkgs revisions. The best way to do that is probably using flakes - but whatever strategy you use you need to depart from the setup the installer gives you, and learn enough to remake your configuration.
    • You’ll find contradictory instructions depending whether they’re written for use of channels or flakes.
    • Going beyond the basics of installing packages, and using premade NixOS modules gets you into the infamous learning curve. For example I’m guessing that managing kwin scripts declaratively in Nix config might be an adventure. But managing them by hand the way you do in Fedora might be the same. (I haven’t tried this, so I’m not sure.)
    • There is some stuff you have to know, like if you want to run binaries that weren’t built for Nix you want to set up nix-ld first.
    • If you’re building software you have to learn to do things the Nix way because of the lack of FHS. That’s great for Nix fans like me, but frustrating for some.
    • There is no graphical software center, nor automatic updates. You have to use the workflow of installing stuff by editing your config file, and get used to using search.nixos.org to find stuff. This is a pro from the perspective of having a stable system that can be rolled back to earlier states, but might feel less user friendly than a GUI workflow.

    Even if you set up flatpak (which is easy to set up tbf) you’re probably going to be managing flatpaks using the CLI.

    It would be easier for me to recommend NixOS if the installer set up a flake configuration with more niceties pre-installed, like nix-ld. The next best thing would be a de facto standard flake starter configuration for people to copy. But like I said, I think there is a case.