I can’t even feel superior to everyone when theirs so many arch installers!! I use real arch btw. I thought “I guess I should go to Gentoo” but then wait, CHROMEOS IS A GENTOO INSTALLER!
I feel like we only have two options now
- Ascend to BSD-land
- Ironically supporting Windows Unironically
edit: I have decided to replace my debian laptop with BSD
Everyone saying nixos the next arch but we are all traumatized so we dont even recommend it /hj. But actually dont use it, youre gonna give up or spend hundreds of hours crafting the perfect deployable system which youre never gonna deploy on anything other than your single laptop that has nixos.
The first person in real life that I met who used nixos was so proud to show off his configs. I let him, and was suitably impressed. I then returned home and decided to play dark souls 2 on my lovely little manjaro.
It is not just about deploying, which to be honest is great. I can build software for my Raspberry Potato on my desktop and remote deploy the config using one line in the terminal.
It is also for when I decide to tinker with my system by changing stuff like audio latency and clock rates for real time audio, USB HID overrides and so on. Normally I would be scared to break something, or worse, fix something without knowing what did it and thus learning nothing from my efforts.
The best part is having a system that you can approach almost scientifically, making it unbreakable in the sense that you can immediately revert to a true former state, both as a build and a config using GRUB and Git, respectively.
Nix users will tell you how passionately they love nix and then give you the 1000 yard stare if you ask if they recommend it.
Imma be honest I never understood NixOS for laptop/workstations, these systems are highly volatile so setting up deployable builds sounds lke a nightmare. For Servers/Deployments it makes bunch more sense.
Been using on my laptop/workstation for years now. Works great. Wanna see my configs?
yeah sure, I think like its not worth the hassle in that case. It’s probs still fun to work on lol
Lots of devs use Ansible configs to have any new machine or reinstall ready in ten minutes. It’s mostly just ‘these apps need to be installed’ and ‘these config files need to be written’, which are a no-brainer to add. The most annoying part is figuring out how to do things with the desktop environment, like install widgets or remap the keyboard.
One benefit of this approach is that I never forget what I fiddled somewhere: I can just look through my config for the particular setting. I have the config for the machine that I set up about ten years ago and which has been chugging along as a server since then — and I won’t need to poke around like an amnesiac should I decide to change something.
Notably, this and dotfiles are popular among devs using Mac, since MacOS has nearly all settings available either via config files or the
defaultssystem from the command line. In comparison, Windows is total ass about configuring via the command line, and even Cinnamon gives me some headache by either not reloading or straight up overwriting my settings.The application-level format isn’t really designed for end user consumption, but WINE uses a text representation of the Windows registry. I imagine that one could probably put that in a git registry and that there’s some way to apply that to a Windows registry. Or maybe a collectiom of .reg files, which are also text.
While i do kinda agree with you that it’s debatable on if it’s even worth it to invest the time in it, i do think it’s neat even for a home setup, but i’d say it depends on what your setup looks like. If you’re the type of user who just uses a stock DE with some apps on top of it there’s probably not much to be gained, but if you have a highly customized setup, like a minimal arch install for example with a bunch of window managers, custom services and configs and all that, then it’s pretty nice to have all that stuff declared, so you can easily replicate it when you reinstall.
Yeah it has surprisingly low boiler plate for a bubch of useful stuff. Have all my systemd services in one file, and all my custom scripts that i package and put into bin in another folder. It allows you to have very exotic setups without hinging all of it on some random script you put in bin in 2020.
But are you truly using nixos, if you don’t have a swarm of 10+ machines that do distributed builds?Can you really say that your system is deployable, if you never tested it on an obscure ARM board and a laptop from 2005?