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.
Ooh if you're thinking of trying something new I recommend Alpine. An extremely underrated distro for a DIYer. It's really lightweight and simple and its packaging system is a breeze to write packages for (for things you'd usually use the AUR for, since there isn't an equivalant for Alpine AFAIK). Void is also fun I ran that for a year. Keep in mind, I'm only talking fun. For a good distro that will Just Work™, Alpine is fine, but I think Arch wins on that front.
NixOS is a journey and I have the privelage of having two systems, one "Home" system running Arch that I use usually and my "Roaming" system which I run whatever and is what I take to class and stuff because usually I only use it to take notes meaning minimum requirement is "Be able to log into a tty so I can write a text file". So being able to use that for NixOS has helped a lot, since if something goes wrong, I can just ssh into my "Home" machine to get work done.
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.
Ooh yeah I'll look into that thank you!
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.
Nothing makes me cringe more than seeing 4 unwraps in a row in Rust code. Like are you sure those errors will never happen? Do you really wanna panic?
And then I do it in my own code and I get it again. Rust error handling sucks ass. (I love Rust btw)
I just made a post about my musing on NixOS so maybe read that? (here) Basically after the main learning curve it's pretty easy to use.
I'm getting the hang of their package manager as well, so if need be I can make my own (Like I would for Arch. The AUR scares me from a security standpoint).
My main advice is to not go against the curve. If the manual says that NixOS does it that way, do it that way, because going against the grain is like going through a cheese grater in this OS.
Unlike Arch where you can do things as you want, in Nix you do things using Nix. You can almost always accomplish what you want, but it's gotta be done the NixOS way. This is actually a benefit rather than a problem once you get used to it, because it starts becoming second nature, and it is extremely powerful.
Oh man now I got a new game I gotta try. Probably the SMS version though to be honest.
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.
Okay a genuine question, what is the method to not let them do this to us? The legitimate only way I can think of is completely disconnecting from society, but this is near impossible because it's near impossible to find a place you can become self-sustainable, and it also takes a lot to even accrue the wealth to have the means to become self-sustainable, which means beimg a part of this society.