I think I can go public with my new Desktop environment now… Its working without flaws for 4 months now.

I switched to nixOS in February, the SDD which I used as an excuse to re-install the system was one of the last deliveries we received before the lock-down-lite.

My linux story goes a long way and I used some distros…

It all began ~2000 out of curiosity and a “SuSE 6” (+/- 1) CD in some magazine I used to read during my lunchtime.

I installed it side by side with windows in a dual boot, but didn’t really use it. Back in that time I was more into games than work. I used it for my daily dose of internet (back then an hour per day, as it was billed by the minute). Browsing and chatting from linux felt more secure. I was the only one in my class back then who did not caught a virus…

Eventually I had to join the forces for my civil duty, and was mostly offline again for some years, Shortly after Blizzard released WoW, I moved to a place where I had steady internet access again (also most military training was over). Due to WoW I used Windows most of the time. Some Ubuntu and OpenSuSE in a VirtualMachine.

Eventually my Laptops Graphics Adapter broke and Windows was unable to boot and if it did, it bluescreened within the first 5 minutes of usage, while an accordingly configured linux was sustainable and even able to play videos. (Well it was basically framebuffer and all hardware support of the graphics adapter disabled, so videos weren’t allowed to be much bigger than what we are used to be a smartphone display today ) It was an Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04.

Once I got the money to buy a new one, I was back on dualbooting with windows. I used an Ubuntu again, always on most recent branch, no LTS.

Eventually I started studying CS, when I installed the exact same version of Ubuntu which was used at unis computers as well.

I tried various other distros in VMs back then.

In the third year of studies I tripple booted between windows (games), ubuntu (Uni stuff) and Funtoo (personal). I had quite a good experience using Funtoo, up until to the point when I wanted to update the systems GCC (knowing it will cause a recompilation of the world) though something went wrong and I ended up in a state where GCC 7 was partially installed but GCC 4 as well, and each tried to use parts of the other installation.

I was unable to recover from that.

This was when I switched to “Arch Linux” as the promise it gave was “as current as Funtoo (or even more current), but precompiled”. I had 3 or 4 nice years using Arch Linux.

No big troubles, though annoyed by how hard it is, to set up environments on two systems that would have been equal or at least “similar enough”.

That drove me towards using nix (the package manager) on Arch Linux. And after my Office VM caught “fire” (Kernel decided to mount all drives RO because of some BTRFS driver error) I switched to nixos there first. After my small laptop got random BTRFS errors as well (which had been all recoverable so far) I switched it over to nixOS + ZFS as well. My main computer had to wait a bit longer. The SDD was ordered, but not yet delivered.

I have to say though, for the small laptop, I have to revert from ZFS to some “classic” FS like ext4 or get an SDD as well, spinning discs are just not suitable for ZFS…

I liked all of them, when I used them. Though today I wouldn’t use anything but Arch or nixOS for desktop, while suggesting Ubuntu to friends and family who wants to get their feet wet with linux.

From todays point of view though, I really have a problem with Ubuntus stance on snap trying to sneak it as default package manager, rather than an addition, and the age of many packages from the standard repository. As well as I have to say, beeing able to tweak every little bit of compilation on Funtoo was nice, but the hours and hours wasted due to recompiling half of the system for gaining some cycles here and there really wasn’t worth the effort, not even in the long run. If one had really bad luck, a simple package update could have take days, during which the computer was barely usable and after which one had to do the next system update, as the package index has moved one a lot…

NixOS though is nearly as current as Arch Linux, easy to modify to my needs, and even updating packages beyond what is in the official channels is often just some “overrideAttrs” away. Similarily its as easy as bumping the version if one wants to change some set of compile flags. And what I really like the most, its easy to install different versions of toolchains, or even the same version of toolchains with different options/plugins/whatever in different environments/projects. It really helps with encapsulation. Last but not least, I can pin my environment to a certain commit of the channel, and whenever I load that environment, it will be the same. I can transfer it to another computer and load it. I will have the same versions of everything up until to the glibc.

Pop!_OS was pretty polished but I ended up sticking with Manjaro for the rolling releases. Been running Linux on the desktop since 1998, the early days of RPM based systems left me with a hatred for them so I stay clear even to this day.

I’ve just started using NixOS after a decent run with Ubuntu Server + i3

I first dabbled with RedHat 4.x (the one from 1996). It was not easy. Nothing worked and it took ages to fix without Internet (because the modem would never work out of the box). Because I only had one computer I had to boot into Windows to read the documentation, reboot to linux, try a few things, reboot to windows again, etc, etc.

Dual booted somewhere from RedHat 6 (1999) but still used Windows as main OS.

Took all the way to 2005 when I started using Ubuntu until I finally ditched Windows. Have not used it since. Changed to use SuSE for a short period, then into slackware for a couple of years. Then a brief venture into Arch but I have problems with rolling releases (it is always something that breaks). Back to Ubuntu 12 or perhaps 14.04 + i3, which I updated to 16.04 and then 18.04 and now finally had enough of it and went distro hunting again for the first time in many years.

After trying and discarding, Ubuntu 20.04, PopOS!, Regolith and Manjaro (still don’t like rolling releases) I figured I give NixOS a try.

So far NixOS has been outstanding for my use-case. I have a very particular setup and now I can have a configuration.nix file containing my entire configuration they way I like it without having distro’s trying to second guess my preferences. And it is trivial to replicate to other machines! Now I only need to find out how to get NixOS onto my AWS server systems and I will have peace of mind.