Thank you so much for the reply!
I really wanted to like it. I’ve used ansible and puppet for work and there, declarative configuration made sense because I need to duplicate the same thing 1000’s of times.
NixOS really seems like a perfect fit in your case.
For desktop, it was incredibly annoying to me to have to change my config file every time I wanted to install a new application.
Interesting. All the declarative distros (I know) operate like that; at least to ensure being declarative. Would you prefer it if a <insert favorite package manager> install <insert name of package>
would automatically modify configuration.nix
?
I still found myself messing with drivers which I hate on any OS.
Fair. Hopefully work on official FOSS drivers provided by Nvidia (and others) will resolve this problem for good in the near future.
When the Bazzite install went well and 99% of the applications I wanted to install were flatpaks anyway, it was a perfect fit. I’ve been running docker containers on my Ubuntu server for years so BoxBuddy was a natural fit for things that aren’t flatpaks (minecraft runs great in one). What’s more, KDE has a lot of keyboard combinations the same as Windows by default which made the switch even better for me. One that I had been fighting to add to gnome, which is admittedly small but annoying, the ability to use Meta+period to bring up an emoji selector, was built right into KDE by default?! I couldn’t believe it.
Then, I started looking for an equivalent to FancyZones found in Windows PowerToys and… What do you know, that’s also built into KDE by default?
Then a friend of mine gave me an AMD graphics card he was getting rid of which was an upgrade to my GTX 1060 I’ve been using since 2018. Since I had already moved to Bazzite, it was a simple re-base to move to the AMD version and it went off without a hitch.
It’s all over, Bazzite and KDE are home for me now.
I’m glad to hear that you’ve been enjoying Bazzite and KDE!
FWIW, if you’d like to explore how declarative Fedora Atomic (and uBlue, hence Bazzite) are in their current iterations, then perhaps it’s worth looking at BlueBuild and uBlue’s own documentation on this. Though, I imagine that (based on your previous experience with NixOS) you wouldn’t necessarily approve of this. Though, I suppose drivers should work this time around.
Thank you for the reply!
Fair. Though, I suppose we shouldn’t ignore that the promoted distros are mostly the distros people use for themselves. And, while some have been on a distrohopping spree to arrive at their home. Others, instead, just got a recommendation, tried it and have been using it ever since. Yet others knew what they sought and/or needed. Hence, in their case, it was more a search to find a distro that satisfied their specific needs. Finally, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that the popular distros mentioned in these discussions are overall good picks.
Absolutely fair. Unfortunately, we’ve got over 300 distros that are currently maintained and 50 would argue they’re newbie friendly 😅. It’s a hard one for sure. But, I believe you can definitely narrow down the list if you know what you want. For example, in my case, there’s literally only one distro that answers my needs. So, I just use that one 😅.
Brings back memories. This process took me about two weeks.
On the other hand, people that don’t ever experience any issues, don’t feel the need to post about that 😅. But, I can understand why it could make you anxious. Thankfully, distro choice does play an important factor in this. So, it makes sense for you to use a distro that’s designed to (somehow) avoid this and thus limits the amounts of troubleshooting you’d have to resort to.
Absolutely fair. Nvidia on Linux can definitely be a mess. The more popular and modern models should work on most distros. However, if your specific model is more obscure, then this can definitely cause more trouble than it’s worth.