I'm aware, but the appimage I run (Slippi Launcher) will run other appimages, and appimage-run can't handle that, since it extracts the appimage, then runs the contents, but it won't automatically do that for other appimages that are run.

Which is why I used a Distrobox and it was awesome, worked like a charm. I used Arch previously, and I just made an Arch distrobox and it worked perfectly.

Sorry for the late reply. In the 2 weeks I've still kept using it and I learned a lot! But a lot of my musings still stand, at least in my mind, but after thinking a little longer, a lot of the thoughts I had also apply to other distros as well.

To answer what you asked in final, a good hypothetical that might answer it is something like GNOME. If the nixos channel blew up in a doomsday scenario, I'd be stuck maintaining my packages myself, right? And I use the doomsday scenario, because the problems here apply for self-made packages as well, but it's easier for me and maybe others to wrap their head around the problem I'm getting at. So with GNOME, I'd have to update every single dependency manually in my nix files. With something like Arch/Alpine I could just have those files, and they have these really neat scripts where I can just bump the version, and it'll download, set the hash up, and bump the version all for me. With Nix there are no such tools. I can't just automate the process, nor is it feasible to do this type of thing manually. As new features are added, so are new options needed to activate those features. And yes, although in this scenario, I would probably just opt to not add these options and set it up myself, when making a package for the general public this isn't the case. If GNOME adds a feature (idk why I picked GNOME I haven't used it in like 5 years) to have extensions managed by the package manager, I'd have to add an option for what extensions are needed and all that. And this is a lot of work, at least as far as I know. The extensions would also have to be packaged.

So I can use something like systemd.services to make my own services as well? Because I've been wondering how to do this as well.

Gotcha yeah that makes sense, so I'll start doing this as well.

I didn't know this before, but a lot of comments said the same! I think I'll start doing this.

I used Void for a while and I loved it! I had to move off because I kept having to make packages for the esoteric programs I kept using (cc65, Zoom, etc.). but I loved every bit of it. Even making the packages was pleasant, and it's the first distro I ever contributed packages to.

Also, at the time I was using musl, and it was good, but not perfect. I'd recommend the glibc version for 0 headaches, but the musl version was very fun.

I could've worded the configuration part a bit better. My gripe wasn't necessarily with that, but more with "If I ever had to make my own package from scratch including dependencies, this would be practically impossible" Nix's derivations and other packaging information is crazy complex and keeping track of versioning, etc. is a nightmare. I think often about doomsday scenarios for systems. It happens, just look at CentOS and all that, so my main thing was if something like that happened, could I maintain the packages I use manually, and the answer was no. Of course I'm not in a doomsday situation, so I'm fine with it as it is. It's just a thought I had, and that was my conclusion.

I guess I could've worded this better but my second problem was: I would like to do everything declaratively. What do I do when a package doesn't have its own declarative configuration options? Before it was simple because it was imperative, so I could just change the config file, but not so much in NixOS.

I disagree with this. If a new shop comes out, how are they supposed to get word-of-mouth over the bigger, more shopped at shop, even if it is better? People will stick with what they know, and the new shop will die. Maybe this is a naïve perspective, but that's how I am thinking here.

I'm weird and use ArchLinux ARM on my Raspberry Pi computers. I think it's much easier to admin, especially if you don't need video accelleration, but I use Arch on the daily, so that's probably why I feel that way.

I also find that Fedora was pretty nice as well, but felt too bloated for what I needed.

Finally, Alpine was amazing. I used to use it as my daily driver for a while as well, and it is nice, lean, and easy to use. The main downside is that it uses the musl libc meaning sometimes packages won't work, or things won't compile. That was very uncommon though and the exception , not the rule.

The main problem I've had on ALL of those distributions were the clock. The Raspberry Pi doesn't have a built-in clock, so you need to use NTP to pull the time down, or else it'll be extremely out of sync. This means setting up your timezone, etc. RPi OS does this for you, but most DIY distros (Alpine, Arch) will not, so you'll need to set that up.