Unfortunately, I don't own any device with Nvidia. Hence, I don't think I'll be able to help out. However, wayblue's maintainers are pretty active. Therefore, consider opening an issue on its GitHub page and perhaps they'll be able to help out.

I apologize for not being of much help here. Wish ya good luck, though!

Happy cake day btw!

Thank you for the reply!

It would likely help if the conversation around new user distros was a bit less of an argument

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.

if the number of suggested distros was a bit less.

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 😅.

It would help with the decision paralysis aspect of it at least.

Brings back memories. This process took me about two weeks.

I see enough threads of experienced users troubleshooting more than I really want to deal with

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.

I don’t like the idea of my whole computer being like that because I chose the wrong hardware (I have nvidia)

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.

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.

What would you need for convincing?

Thank you for mentioning that! Did the slower distros you tested come with older kernels?

Definitely one of the better answers I've received so far. Thank you for that. However, I feel as if the following part reveals that it's not as 'protected' as I'd like:

It also doesn’t protect you if someone gets root access to your device through other remote means.

Though, at this point, I've somewhat accepted that I'm seeking a software solution for a hardware problem. Hence, the impossibility of my query... I hope I'm wrong and perhaps you can point me towards the solution I'm seeking. However, if that's not the case, then I would like you to know that I appreciate your comment. Thank you.

This seems like a very complicated way to achieve your goal! It sounds like sitting yourself down and giving you a stern talking to might be a beter aporoach.

You're probably right. But, it ensures a surefire method if accomplished.

Having said that, if you have these very important files that you don't want to lose, please make sure they're backed up somewhere off of your machine. Storage fails, and it's a horrible feeling losing something important. Unfortunately doing so would defeat the approach you're thinking of.

Thank you for your concerns!

This might be a case of needing to reframe the question to get to the cause of the issue, and then solve that.

Makes sense.

So, why do you want to make it hard to reinstall your machine?

I want to set it up in a particular way to ensure maximum productivity. But I'm afraid that I'll not go through with it (as has happened a lot in the past). Thus, making it impossible to reinstall should enable me to go through. As I wouldn't have any other choice.

Is it the amount of time you spend on it

The amount of time spent unproductively. Yes.

the chance of screwing it up

Nope. I haven't had a serious breakage since over one and a half years. I think I'm managing splendidly.

needing it working

Don't really have particular problems related to keeping my system up and running.

has it become a compulsion or something else?

Not sure what you meant with this.

Maybe if we can get to the root of the issue we can find a solution.

I believe I touched upon this earlier in this comment. I just want to be very productive.

With regard to TPM, it's basically just a key store, so you can use it fir anything really, althought it's normally used by generating a TPM key and using it to encrypt the key that's actually used to encrypt your data, storing the encrypted key with the OS. Just reinstalling won't wipe the TPM, but unless you made an effort to save the encrypted key it'll be gone. Given your problem statement above it just adds to the data you'd need to save, which isn't helpful.

Uhmm..., I feel as if I should properly read up on this. Have you got any pointers you would recommend?

😅. It's a requirement that the data stays on the same drive that I run my system from.

Do you need it to be failing on every device or just on a device that you control?

Actually, I'm fine with a solution that only works on a device that I control. But, failing on every device is nice as well.

Scratch that, i missed a line. So simply files stored but not user readable.

But also not being able to be copied; even through a disk clone.

I've failed tremendously in making my demands come across :P .

Uhmm..., what you propose with gpg definitely solves one part of the puzzle.

But, if I understood correctly, it doesn't help to prevent a disk clone from getting hold of the files.

Yes, the files are encrypted, but that's not sufficient for my needs by itself. If the files would somehow destroy or corrupt themselves on a disk clone (or something to that effect), I would have acquired what I'm seeking.

Like do you want it to be unreadable, or unmodified, or just not deleted?

I don't necessariy care for any of those. They are 'bonuses' if you will. Though...:

• Unreadable will be required for preventing recreating the file elsewhere.
• Unmodifiable is not necessarily required. Maybe I would like to 'append' something to an existing file. But I'm fine either way. It should not be possible to delete some of the original data though.
• Not deleted is a must as well.