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Why go through the trouble to use Arch?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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That's interesting; any particular reason? I went the other way around (Arch for multiple years -> Gentoo for a year or so -> NixOS for over a decade now), and never looked back.
I thought about this for a long while, and realised I wasn't sure why, just that most of my work has gravitated towards Arch for a while.
Eventually, I've decided the reason for the move is because of three specific issues, that are really all the same problem - namely I don't want to learn the nix config language to do the things I want to do right now.
I've read lots of material on flakes, even first modified then wrote a flake to get not-yet-packaged nvidia 5080 modules installed (for a corporate local llm POC-turned-PROD, was very glad I could use nix for it!) I still just don't really get how all the pieces hang together intuitively, and my barrier is interest and time.
Lanzaboote for secure boot. I'm going to encrypt disks, and I'm going to use the TPM for unlocking after measured uki, despite the concerns of cold-boot attacks, because they aren't a problem in my threat model. Like the nvidia flake, I don't really get how it hangs together intuitively.
Home management and home-manager. Nix config language is something I really want to get and understand, but I've been maintaining my home directory since before 2010, and I have tools and methods for dealing with lots of things already. The conversion would take more time than I'm prepared to devote.
Most of the benefits of nix are things I already have in some format, like configuration management and package tracking with git/stow, ansible for deployment, btrfs for snapshots, rollback and versioning. It's not all integrated in one system, but it is all known to me, and that makes me resistant to change.
I know that if I had a week of personal time to dig in and learn, to shake off all the old fleas and crutch methods learned for admin on systems that aren't declarative, I'd probably come away with a whole new appreciation for what my systems actually look like, and have them all reproducible from a readable config sheet. I'm just not able to make that time investment, especially for something that doesn't solve more problems than I've already solved.