• Zozano@lemy.lolEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      I’m still a Linux noob all things considered, and I’ve been using NixOS for six months or more.

      It is HARD, but I see the true value of it. I will never need to reinstall Linux because I broke it, that’s simply impossible.

      If I ever need to migrate my system, it’s all backed up to github. With a single

      Bash update.sh

      every single .config file backed up, system upgraded, all packages updated.

      I just love Nix, it’s the perfect OS for me.

      Now I just need to learn how to use flakes…

      Sidebar: I’ve never asked before, but maybe someone can help me out. If I install a flake of an application, am I supposed to add it to the existing flake, or can I modulate flakes?

      I’ve noticed when installing the nixvim flake it generates a new flake and it runs when I issue the

      nix run ~/.dotfiles/nixvim/flake.nix

      command, but I don’t want to have to run that command every time. I feel like making a fish abbreviation isn’t the correct way of doing this.

      • tinkling4938@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        So I’ve only been using nix about a year and only used flakes. I use in two ways.

        First, I have my main nix flake. Most everything is controlled from that. It has several outputs from full blown nixos builds per host or some home manager builds for non-nixos systems.

        Third-party flakes I use as inputs to my own flake then use the override system to inject them into nixpkgs. Then I just install whatever like normal from nixpkgs. I can either override an existing pkg (neovim nightly replaces regular neovim for me), or you can just add as a new package to nixpkgs by using a different attribute name.

        Second way is for projects with their own repo. I’ll add a project flake that has a devshell with direnv so as soon as I enter that directory it sets up a sort of virtual environment just for that project. You can add outputs to it so others can use as a third-party flake.

        My main starting point was https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config for this design.

      • visc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        NixOS is for people who have accidentally uninstalled 90% of their system because they didn’t pay attention to what other packages depend on the thing they were uninstalling and were desperately looking for a an undo button.

      • kekmacska@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        i started learning about linux 4 months ago. Installed Arch with archinstall pretty easily to a VM, it booted up no problem. But you have to manually install the desktop, if you want a gui (who doesn’t lol). But there are many desktops for Arch, the most common ones have pretty good documentation. But if i were you, i’d experiment with some more niche desktop emviroments

        • Spectrism@feddit.org
          0·
          13 days ago

          No need to manually install desktop environments, archinstall also does that (Profile --> Desktop).

            • Spectrism@feddit.org
              0·
              13 days ago

              You did, probably just didn’t see it ;) It’s been part of it for years, since around 2020 according to GitHub. But to be fair, calling the option “Profile” might not be very intuitive for some people, so it’s easy to miss.

        • 1985MustangCobra@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          I haved used many distros and DEs. my favorites are keyboard driven like i3 and such. For now i use fedora because i needed something to work out of the box. I would like to stay in the terminal.

          • kekmacska@lemmy.zipEnglish
            0·
            14 days ago

            i tried lxqt and gnome. those were disappointments. And i used kde and cinnamon too, those are good

      • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        Just use kvm/qemu and install it. When I want to play with detailed setups I install slackware and start configuring/compiling.

    • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      I’ve never had any issues with my Arch install being unpredictable. It has always worked exactly as I expected it to, even though I update it every couple of days.

      • luluu@lemmy.world
        0·
        14 days ago

        It has always worked exactly as I expected it to

        Just expect it to break, then it will behave as expected taps head

      • kekmacska@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        imagine if you update it after 2 weeks. Arch is okay, if you keep backups. otherwise, you are basically playing a russian roulette

      • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
        0·
        14 days ago

        I’ve been using Arch since 2014. If I could be arsed, I could write you a looooooooong list of regressions I’ve had to deal with over the years. For an experienced Linux user, they’re usually fairly easy to deal with, but saying you never have to deal with anything is just a lie.

        My experience with Arch is basically: it’s all very predictable until it isn’t and you suddenly find yourself troubleshooting something random like unexplainable bluetooth disconnects caused by a firmware or kernel update.

        • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          Did you consider that the problems you have might not be problems that other people experience? I very highly doubt our two systems are at all similar. Your experience is just that, yours, and so you don’t have any right to be arbitor over whether or not I’m lying.

          • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
            0·
            14 days ago

            That’s such a cop-out answer and totally missing the point. I’ve run Arch on 4 different systems, and yes I had different issues on each and sometimes issues that hit across the board.

            At the end of the day, whether or not this was just my personal experience doesn’t matter. What matters is that the issues were always caused by what Arch is: a unstable rolling release distro that pushes out the latest version of upstream packages, bugs and all. Sooner or later some will hit you, telling yourself and other people otherwise is deluding yourself and those people.

            • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              0·
              14 days ago

              Yeah, and sooner or later, I’ll die of old age, or cancer, or an accident, or get audited on my taxes.

              None of those things have happened yet either. Not only that, but the same is true for every operating system that has ever existed, or will ever exist, including every distro of Linux.

              • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
                0·
                14 days ago

                Here’s the thing: your answer is both invalidating and ignorant, and it shows a lack of understanding of what differentiates Arch from a stable distro.

                • My wifi, that had been working fine since I installed this computer in 2020, broke in kernel 6.11 and 6.12 because Arch pushed those updates.
                • Early plasma 6.0 releases were rough as balls for months, because Arch pushed those updates.
                • My bluetooth, that had been working since I installed this computer in 2020, started to randomly disconnect sometime last year due to buggy firmware updates because Arch pushed those updates.
                • Hell even plain old intel ethernet on my old system from 2014 suddenly started hanging up under load a year or two ago (never found the cause, did find a workaround).

                None of these issues were a fault of my own, all I did was pacman -Syu, and none of this would happen on a stable distro. I’m not saying Arch is shit because of this, I’m saying: beware of what you are getting into when you choose Arch: for every single package on your system, you are effectively at the mercy of whatever “upstream” decides to shit out that week. Being delusional about that fact and having guys come crawling out of the woodworks everytime this is mentioned, saying platitudes like: “I nEvEr HaD aN iSsUe” doesn’t help anyone.

        • Dempf@lemmy.zip
          0·
          14 days ago

          What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off – over the years I’ve wasted so many hours with those “user friendly” distros because I need a newer version of a dependency, or I need to install something that isn’t in the repos. Worst case I have to figure out how to compile it myself.

          It’s very rare to find something that isn’t in the Arch official repos or the AUR. Personally I’ve found that being on the bleeding edge tends to save me time in the long run, as there’s almost no barriers to getting the packages that I need.

          • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nl
            0·
            14 days ago

            What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off

            Yes, and that’s why after more than 10 years I still use Arch. I like having the latest version of things and I’m confident enough in my abilities that I know that if something breaks I can always either find a fix, or at least identify the offending package, hold it back, report the bug and wait for the issue to be resolved.

            There are times where it can be trying though. The first plasma 6 releases for example were rough. More recently, I’ve also been having issues with 6.11 and 6.12 kernels and my ax200 wifi that I only recently found a fix to. My wifi would freeze whenever I started streaming video from the PC to my TV, but only in kernels after 6.11. Turning off TCP segmentation offloading with ethtool resolved it (ethtool -K wlan0 tso off). You don’t want to know how long I had been pulling my hair out at that issue until I found the fix.

    • ogeist@lemmy.world
      0·
      14 days ago

      Check the comment from superkret, basically overengineered, redundant and not very intuitive.

      I work in german SW development, so I understand. I would put it like this, german backends are among the best you can find but german frontends are usually complicated and not intuitive…

      • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        The main problem is the way YaST2 is (not) integrated with the modern KDE and Gnome settings. Gnome 40 then screwed things up even more for them as every item is now part of the overview, there ain’t the classical menu anymore.

        If you know where to find things it’s great, but right now it indeed feels quite messy with lots of settings hard to find and split in lots of submenus.

      • Draghetta@lemmy.world
        0·
        14 days ago

        SUSE was a German company a century ago, then it changed hands more than a soap bar in a public restroom and now I have no idea if it’s even a terrestrial company anymore

        • Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org
          0·
          14 days ago

          I think it means that OpenSUSE is “all of the above”—stability, flexibility, security—because those are qualities frequently attributed to German things/products.

          It isn’t really a joke in the sense of it making fun of Germany or anything like that.

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      14 days ago

      I thought the joke was that each distro has a descriptor that ends with -y with openSUSE’s descriptor being unexpected but still matching the pattern.

    • Asetru@feddit.org
      0·
      14 days ago

      It is? I had tumbleweed installed and switched to fedora after only a few weeks because it kept freezing.

      • festnt@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        14 days ago

        oh my girlfriend’s laptop also just keeps freezing with opensuse. do you have an nvidia card by any chance?

        • Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org
          0·
          14 days ago

          nvidia card by any chance?

          I think random freezing is one of the symptoms of installing it with Ventoy. Ventoy mucks up one of the installer flags or something like that, so even wiki indicates it’s not supported. (Neither is installing it from the Live version, if I’m not mistaken.)

          • festnt@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            14 days ago

            oh well, i guess it must be a different problem on my gf’s laptop since we used dd to put the iso in a pen drive

          • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            0·
            14 days ago

            Correct! Ventoy adds boot parameters on its own, screwing up some fundamental settings (sth. that can happen on any distro that isn’t making the user configure everything by hand). It’s also a questionable piece of software on its own given the binary blob it adds to every stick… do not use it.

      • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
        0·
        14 days ago

        Weird. I promptly tried Fedora and switched to Tumbleweed after Fedora kept crashing soon after startup. Hardware configuration probably affects the outcome a lot.

        • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          The only fair comparison of Linux distros is always on devices of Linux vendors as they both pick the right hardware as well as merge Kernel patches if necessary.

          I do however concur that OpenSuse offers basically everything. Except for intuitive system settings - but at least they’re all there, you never really have to use the CLI. Other than with others who will eventually lack something. Also the bootable btrfs snapshots by default are a dream for common users.

  • Fliegenpilzgünni@slrpnk.net
    0·
    14 days ago

    Sees “Germany”

    Die Kommentarspalte dieser Pfostierung befindet sich ab sofort im Besitz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland meine Kameraden!

  • superkret@feddit.org
    0·
    14 days ago

    When you run OpenSUSE, you can feel it was made by Germans.
    The installer is a beautiful example of German engineering.
    The package manager is a perfect example of German over-engineering.
    If you run it with KDE, you have 2 redundant GUI admin tools for every config in the system, and 4 for setting up printers.

    • richardisaguy@lemmy.world
      0·
      14 days ago

      Can i get some context please? My fedora install wasn’t using TPM, i had to manually configure it; i haven’t noticed any difference in boot speed with or without TPM encryption

        • richardisaguy@lemmy.world
          0·
          14 days ago

          I want to have data-at-rest encryption, so that the only password i need to insert is my user one, this allows me to not have to type passwords multiple times. If i had the regular encryption password i would have to enable autologin in SDDM, which would do away with the encryption on kdewallet and all my credentials.

          Plus i also enable secureboot, and use fedora kinoite, so that i is hard to tamper with my boot stuff without my TPM wiping itself off my encryption password, this gives me a very Bitlocker-like setup, but without the shittiness of having my encryption keys linked to microsoft’s terrible encryption system and user accounts, i can actually control my stuff like this. For a laptop, i must say data-at-rest encryption is a must!

          This setup gives me multiple security layers; took my laptop off me -> booted my laptop, faced with user password -> tried to boot another OS, TPM wiped itself, no more encryption key -> computer now asks for encryption password, has to find a way around LVM2 encryption -> LVM2 encryption (somehow) defeated they must now crack my user password, or have to (try) to decrypt my credentials on the file system itself; after all these convoluted and extremely hard steps i think we can agree this person really deserves to have access to my cool wallpapers

    • Zink@programming.dev
      0·
      14 days ago

      Mint: come for the ease of installation and use, stay because it’s just Ubuntu and Debian under the hood so it has tons of support, and the terminal is right there if you need to out so some real shit.

      I think mine doesn’t roll off the tongue in quite the same way.