declarative configuration

Easy and fearless updates

Rollbacks

Dependency Hell, begone

I have been thinking to give NixOS a spin but feel like it's above my brain capacity for me to handle. Do you also use homemanager and Flakes? Homemanager kinda makes sense (manage packages for non root users) but what does Flakes do?

Mint

Generally works in cases where Ubuntu would and you don't have to deal with Canonical's choices.

Great wiki

PKGBUILDs

The AUR

I agree, it's great!

• image with baked in nvidia drivers which work out of the box without too much fuss
• if you encounter problems, you can refer to the system76 website or use a solution provided by the community, since it's based on Ubuntu
• installation with full disk encryption enabled by default
• right now it uses a slightly customized version of GNOME as DE (with "normal"/traditional windows and optionally a tiling wm), but system76 is working on a Rust-based DE, named Cosmic DE

I’ve been using Pop for about 2 years. I have yet to run into an issue that I couldn’t fix. It’s the first distro that made ditching windows easy.

I'm currently doing my second pass of Nix after diving deep into it last time and coming out unsatisfied. The same problems that I had before with it are problems I'm seeing again:

• disjointed configs pulled from random source or build repos on the internet
• unintuitive grammars with parameters that require you to download an autocompletion spec
• flakes that aren't immediately easy to grok

Contrast that with my last Guix experience:

• Lisp form, super easy to understand grammar
• Recipes are so trivial that I've written three on my first day
• Source tree is included and you are expected to add branches to it

The only problem with Guix that I can see is that it's not as popular

Easy to set up, very helpful community. If you liked Manjaro or think Manjaro is sketchy but like the idea of a slightly pre-configured arch, check it out.

It's arch. It just happened to be the composition i had my previous arch setup as. Yay for AUR stuff, KDE Plasma for DE. Includes a couple of useful tools and makes for a very solid OS.

Anyone who has been in the Ubuntu sphere of things with Linux, should take a moment to try arch. EndeavourOS is perfect for these people.

Only FOSS software and repositories unless otherwise enabled

Cutting edge application releases so I get the newest toys after they’ve been decently tested

The big advantage IMHO, is the out of the box BTRFS set up that lets you simply roll back to a non-broken state, right from the grub menu, should an update break your system. I haven't had to use it yet, but it is a huge source of comfort knowing it is there.

Also, many people coming to opensuse remark how much snappier it is than other distros.

We cannot forget about the wiki, which is a great resource for not only the Arch distro, but for any Linux install.

basically Arch, including the AUR

• Supports a wide variety of hardware, including ARM devices such as the Pinebook Pro.

• Up-to-date rolling release.

• Multiple DE’s available with customized, clean interfaces.

Endeavour has been my default for a long while now, using Plasma KDE. It supports the flexibility needed to customise and make my own themes for as a low-vision user, and smooths a lot of the rough edges of pure Arch. I had Arch installed previously, but again, having that additional helping hand, coupled with a truly wonderful community, really made all the difference. I left Windows after the mess that was 8, I couldn't go back..