fabian_drinks_milk

I am honestly not sure as to what the benefit of that is compared to the approach of CalyxOS with MicroG. It has worked for me perfectly, except for one app, BeReal for some reason gives a pop-up telling that Google Play Services is missing, even though I already have MicroG fully setup and working. Other apps have all worked fine, including Google Apps like YouTube and my banking app.

Great points. I kinda feel the same with containerization. I have been wanting change my OS on my home server and while NixOS is great for that, I have decided to do things differently and use OpenSUSE Micro OS. My plan was actually Fedora Core OS, but after that Red Hat drama I decided to run with SUSE instead. It is an immutable distro with atomic upgrades that is designed for being a container host. It uses Ignition as the configuration for setting up things like users, services, networking, etc. My plan is then to just use containers like I was doing before on Fedora Server and for the other things to use Nix to build container images. Instead of using DockerFile, you'd use Nix Flakes to create really minimal images. Instead of starting with a full distro like Alpine, Nix starts from scratch and copies all dependencies over as specified in your flake. So the image only contains the absolute minimum to run. I think I'd be a fun side project while learning more about Ignition, Linux containers and Nix Flakes.

As for your point on config, I think it's just part of the trade offs of NixOS. You either have a system that can be modified easily at anytime through the shell or you have a system that you modify centrally and is fully reproducible. You can already install packages with nix-env in the command line without changing your config, but that also won't be reproducible. Maybe a GUI app for managing your config and packages could be helpful, although I'm pretty sure that's low priority for NixOS right now.

The Gnome desktop is a pretty good middle ground in my opinion. It is in my opinion even simpler than Windows to use and allows enough customizability with extensions. People in the Linux world love to dunk on it for using slightly more RAM and not having the same amount of customizability as other desktops like KDE Plasma.

Not only that, but requiring internet for installing also isn't optimal for many developing countries. What, you need to bring your PC to an internet cafe to install Windows? I hope Microsoft at least offers physical USB installation drives that don't require internet access.

Unstable is and from what I've heard, nixpkgs even is one of the fastest repos with updating packages (also the largest). But I still wouldn't recommend it for OP.

I am currently looking at using OpenSUSE Micro OS for a home server. It is based on Tumbleweed and also rolling release, but it has an immutable filesystem and can automatically update and rollback. It's similar to Fedora Core OS, which was my first choice, until the Red Hat drama.

That's true for the configuration.nix. I still cannot fully wrap my head around using Nix Flakes for managing my nixos configuration, home manager and overlaying or creating packages. My setup so far works, but I still don't feel like I fully understand it.

It's great and I'm using it, but I don't think someone coming from Linux Mint should use it right away. It can get quite complex even coming from Arch or Artix Linux.

There are some really mixed answers here. I would stick to the mainline distros and not go for a fork with a few customizations. It does depend on what you want, especially if you are willing to learn using the terminal and if you want bleeding edge or more stability. My list would be:

• Debian
• Kubuntu
• Fedora
• Pop!_OS
• Arch Linux (If you want to learn Linux from its fundamentals)

I haven't really used Pop!_OS! yet, but I am getting a System76 laptop so I'll definitely check it out. I hope they get their Cosmic desktop out soon so they can differentiate their distro more instead of being another fork with a few customizations and default apps.

(If you want to learn by pain that is)

I can't confirm that (I distro hopped to NixOS) I can confirm that Arch is a solid distro worth learning and will give you the skills to manage it long-term. Compared to Arch based distros like Manjaro, EndeavorOS and Garuda where people tend to screw up their install easily when installing the wrong packages from the AUR and updating with dependency conflicts.