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Yeah, it is a lot of initial work, but once you got your shell.nix or flake.nix in place it is really nice, to not have to deal with different dependencies and versions in different projects.
But you can also archive the same on any distro with the nix package manager.
except i want my computer to function for my needs without "a lot of initial work"
It's an investment for the next time you install on a new dev machine. After install, I will literally run a single command to return to the exact state of my dev environment.
Sure but how often do you need to actually change your machine?
Me personally, a lot. I work on 4 different rigs (inlcuding latops) and yes, for me, it does save time.
I'm actually building a new work station right now.
About weekly in my case.
Probably not often, but as a Debian user, it's a PITA to get back to where I was before I fucked up my system. Nix(OS) sounds like a future investment to me, just in case I ever fuck up and need to get back to where I was ASAP. Been there once already and it was NOT fun.
That was from a professional standpoint BTW, privately I'm still a dirty Windows pleb, because that's what I'm most familiar with.
PS: I'm already using a dotfiles repo, which already saves me a ton of time in settings things up.
Just use Fedora then 🤷.
It's definetly a distro for tinkerers. But so is arch and it's way more stable for my tinkering than arch.
Edit: nicer grammar
This is why I run Manjaro, which I never hear any love for here for some reason. It's the rolling releases and cutting edge updates of Arch, but with the ease of use and reliability of Debian. Insert a bootable USB and have a fully functional system in a couple minutes.
Manjaro just works, from gaming to development, and I've never been forced to play games to install a hardware driver or newer library that isn't part of the release like with Debian or Ubuntu.
Been using Linux for over 20 years and never seen a distro so trouble free.
The reason you don't see a lot of love for Manjaro is because your experience isn't quite typical. Manjaro is notorious for taking Arch and making it less stable. It's mostly Arch with some defaults and software to make it easier to set up, but the few cases where it drifts from Arch tend to cause more issues than if you just used Arch directly.
Interesting, I've installed it on quite a few machines now, all with widely varying hardware. Aside from my development/gaming rig I've got a shop laptop which is used by various goons to view shop drawings and look up parts, one the ex-wife still hasn't managed to break, one is my 9 year old daughter's and another is a potato that runs my 3d printer (to be fair this one is fossilized and doesn't get updates).
All are working great with no setup effort and no maintenance so I guess it's a classic case of YMMV. I wouldn't have used Arch for any of those use cases except maybe the 3d printer.
Agreed, i had more issues on Manjaro than i ever did on raw Arch. The Manjaro team, at least during the time i used it, didnt seem very good at keeping things working. So many issues with bad packages, keys expiring, stuff like that.
Arch was a blessing.
However, NixOS has ascended me to heaven lol.