Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself “maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point”, but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn’t make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.
My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it’s what I’m used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it’s good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don’t think it would make a difference at all.
What does that mean? Like there is one calendar app?
Tinkering, really. I did a bunch of stuff with wine and virtualization and troubleshooted across versions. One time I manually updated the version of sqlite in python’s std lib to be a newer version. I picked a non LTS kernel once. All these things compounded and bloated my system. And when I went to do clean up, I didnt have a record of exactly everything I installed, what I used and what I didnt. It was guesswork to clean up my disk or even remember the tools I used to get a project working.
This is solved with declarative configuration, which is the basis of NixOS. I believe VanillaOS 2 has something similar. Likewise, this is one the great benefits of docker, vagrant, ansible, etc.
NixOS configuration is done entirely through code, so all of your packages are in a list (although that list can be spread across multiple files; it’s a bit to explain)
I’ve found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go “oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore”
I appreciate the way things are configured a lot, but I would not recommend it unless you really like coding and you have time to tinker. It’s not too hard to get simple config setup, but I spiraled down a deep rabbit hole really quickly.
EDIT: If my comment for some reason persuaded you to use NixOS, I recommend you get a basic config setup before installing it. I’d also recommend you look at how annoying it can be to run dynamically-linked applications (i.e. you download a random executable off the Internet and try to run it, or you try to run something you downloaded with npm)
While it sounds sexy and attractive… Not sure the amount of time needed to configure your NixOS is worthwhile. (Except if you have time to spare and want that learning experience !)
Just put everyhting In your personal notes and you have a similar “feature”?
Perhaps, but when I accidentally nuked my system by dd’ing to one of the hard drives, being able to install the exact same system back onto it by pointing the installer to my git repository was an excellent experience.
Yeah can’t argue against that, never tried NixOS !
NixOS is a declarative distro. Meaning it you can declare pretty much every aspect of it from what software is installed to how the system is configured from a config file.
Using your calandar example, you can list Thunderbird (or whatever) as a package you want in the configuration and it will be installed. You can also use that same configuration on another machine and produce the same environment.
Relevant to the original point, since all your software is listed in a text file, you can easily see exactly what’s installed.