Normally I always forget why I still keep thinking about switching back to Windows. Today was a great reminder. Linux can be frustrating. This post is somewhat about awareness and partly about me learning about other peoples experiences. I updated my CachyOS as usual. There were some system packages upgraded and I got the notification to reboot. Figuring I’d do it later I left after some time and the PC went to sleep. Upon returning the screen stayed black. Even upon forced reboot. Remembering I was using Limine with BTRFS snapshots I tried multiple previous snapshots but to no avail. I remember this happened before. So now I face another reinstall… This and having to dive into the deep end of terminal commands to get drivers, programs or games working can be quite frustrating. I understand why people are turned off and go back to Windows…
Onto NixOS for me. A big dive but it seems very stable which might be just what i need. I feel like the philosophy of NixOS combined with a graphical store to install programs and what not seems like a great solution.
What would your ultimate distro be like?
I think NixOS is a superb choice if you have the time and energy to invest in it. I’m currently using Guix System (a GNU fork of Nix) and I’m very very happy with it. Previously I’ve been on openSUSE Tumbleweed because I thought the most important thing for me was btrfs with an easy snapshot system. But then, one day, when I was writing ansible playbooks to configure my OS I realized that what I care most about is declarative configurations. Now I’ve completely stopped using ansible for my laptop/desktop, and just rely upon native Guix configuration. I love it.
I do still run MicroOS on all of my servers because it “just works” and I think transactional systems are great for servers. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about trying out NixOS/Guix System as my server OS of choice, but we’ll see how that goes.
If you’re willing to put in the time, I think you’ll love NixOS.
Edit: Nix/Guix are also transactional.