The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Slav Power]

Anyone who has a general-purpose PC expecting their 8GB cards to game will be sorely disappointed.

Fixed that for ya.

we're seeing SteamOS outperforming Windows at running ProtonDB platinum-rated Windows games.

See, I hate """benchmarks""" like these as they are cherry picking games and then putting a sensational headline that doesn't even line up with their cherry picked charts.

-Returnal is an outlier that runs way better on the 'eckOS than it does on Windows. That doesn't mean it's pulling performance out of it's ass, it means that this specific game has some odd performance issue on Win11.
-Win11 on Asus drivers actually outperforms Linux in Borderlands 3 by a margin. But no one would use that to say that Linux is completely dogshit for gaming since "that's an outlier dude". Rules for me not for thee.
-Homeworld 3 has a very small improvement on Linux, with the Lenovo drivers clearly struggling compared to Asus ones, where the Asus one matches Linux within the margin of error in the lower presets.

Cyberpunk 2077 and DOOM are definitely games where Linux's way of dealing with the games gives it an advantage, but again, an outlier that means Linux does something better in these specific games than Windows. Maybe DXVK is doing some heavy lifting to make it run better for example. Most importantly: all of these tests are done on handhelds that can run SteamOS where all the performance is arguably dogshit on both if we're talking PC gaming, since that's where people want Linux. On full ATX desktops.

This is why I have a problem with all of these Windows vs Linux benchmarks. They're not objective, they're not informational. They'll cherry pick a few select games and twist the results in such a way that they can claim Total Linux Victory and it's so disingenuous that it's just adding fuel to the dumpster fire that is "Linux community's reputation in the common consensus".

What I'd like to see, is a massive test of all kinds of games. New, old, DirectX 9 to DirectX 12. Vulkan and OpenGL. All of them done on a decent PC rig, something with a fully sized RTX 3060 and an AMD equivalent to compare how both GPU vendors are handling themselves under both OS'. A massive dataset where you can't do some smarmy journalistic data manipulation, just an objective megachart that'll show how every game compares. And most importantly: do the best possible job at figuring out why a given game runs better/worse on Linux/Windows. None of this "unlocking hardware potential with the superior OS" bullshit that all these articles peddle. The only reason a game runs significantly worse on one of the two operating systems is some sort of bottleneck. Is it the API where DXVK manages to circumvent whatever's choking it under Windows? If so, can you replicate it under Windows by dropping in DXVK as it is a Windows native binary that also works under Windows? And if it's better/worse by a margin, is it an actual improvement or just a margin of error? Re-run those tests a few times to see if it's just small fluctuations or constant improvement patterns.

Unlike what most people ITT think, no, I don't hate Linux gaming. I'm actually pretty happy that there's some sort of alternative forming in this space, but I'm more interested in the technical aspects of it, since this can be a mutually beneficial race where both platforms reach the same base performance level in all games. It's clear that some things Windows does worse, and some things Linux does worse. Now it's to figure out what both are doing worse so that both can be better. That's what I'd like to see from these comparisons but that's never what I get, I only get half-truths, manipulations, lies and emotionally charged articles worthy of mainstream propagandistsjournalists. Don't make it an "us vs them" turf war like a bunch of class spergs, because that's what Linux gaming coverage is right now and I fucking hate it.

 

[daffodils]

libxfce4ui depends on gtk3, which depends on wayland, at least as of latest versions in Arch/extra.

Wayland support is still optional in GTK3 and 4, but the X11 backend was deprecated earlier this year and they intend to remove it in GTK5 (no set release date)>

 

[Betonhaus]

Wayland support is still optional in GTK3 and 4, but the X11 backend was deprecated earlier this year and they intend to remove it in GTK5 (no set release date)>

Would that cause a fork? As there are several GTK based DEs that still use X11

 

[Froggy Fresh Sextape]

I can't say for sure whether the problem is Wayland, but would it kill a channel with a production crew to install two distros on the same PC?

The point is to get clicks and engagement with the least amount of effort possible.

He could install Arch, get the current kernel and the LTS kernel, get X11 and Wayland, get every DE, then figure out from there what's tanking the framerate but why would the average youtube viewer care about that?

(oh and for added fun some games run like absolute ass if installed to a btrfs partition because of the lack of automatic case-folding. PSO2 is one. so technically there's one more variable here to check...)

 

[Dread First]

snip

You're not wrong, I do agree with a fair majority of what you bring up, having said that... I'm a simple man. As long as my emulators for my retro vidya work at full speed and at 3/4/5x rendering resolution, as long as I'm able to play Dark Souls and occasionally Master Duel, and so long as I'm able to read my pirated mangas and watch my pirated movies and TV shows, I'm 100% comfortable on Linux. Windows is technically that extra bit nicer and there are odds and ends Microsoft are able to accomplish that Linux (and BSDs too) can't ever hope to accomplish (e.g. sound quality), but I refuse to deal with Microsoft and its incessant push for Copilot everywhere whiel rolling back my group policy changes. Also, still haven't forgiven M$ for shitcanning LTSC 2019 support from 2029 to 2025 because Windows 11 had to happen. Relative to the constant circlejerk of knowing M$ is a predatory company and resigning myself to "not better options," I actually quite prefer the constant flame wars of systemd vs. runit/OpenRC/sysvinit, X11 vs Wayland, Debian and its children vs Red Hat and its children. But I'm a terminally online faggot who's been fiddling with Linux intermittently ever since I was a pretentious high school kid trying to breathe life back into a dying hand-me-down PC, so obviously YMMV.

 

[Akerman]

If you use NVIDIA I highly recommend seeing if you have 4G decoding and ReBar enabled for better management* of memory under Linux. I was going to do my own testing, but someone already did one for me. Here is a guy running a Cyberpunk 2077 test with all settings on ultra/high, full path based ray tracing enabled at 1200p with DLSS4 enabled and Frame Gen enabled while encoding the video he is screen recording using NVENC on a RTX 4070S. He has above 4G decoding and ReBar enabled, and the video highlights alt & tabbing between the game and a browser window:

He's also got Thunderbird open under it's own virtual workspace, as well as Vencord in another virtual workspace with Google Chrome and Steam 'Friends'. He also runs dual 1200p displays. He's not going over VRAM and everything seems fine. I can't speak to AMDGPU on this, but as a NVIDIA user I have had the same experience with the exact same setup on a 4070. I regularly play heavy games on a widescreen monitor while watching vids in 4k on Chromium for hours on end. I also have 4G Decoding and ReBar enabled ofc.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Would that cause a fork? As there are several GTK based DEs that still use X11

I'm sure gtk3 will live on in some form. Because as far as I know mate, cinnamon, and xfce are going to be sticking with it. I don't follow their development super close. But I imagine I would have heard something if they planned to drop using gtk3. From what I understand the reason they exist was to keep using gtk3.

Looking at the history of these. They have shown, they are perfectly willing to fork, and maintain their own.




Plus there are a lot of applications outside of just these desktop environment's that use gtk3. Even newer, wayland projects, like nwg-shell, and the other nwg applications. So I don't think it being deprecated by them, will mean it's the end of it. I could be wrong, but I don't see it happening.

 

[Max Weber]

I'm sure gtk3 will live on in some form. Because as far as I know mate, cinnamon, and xfce are going to be sticking with it. I don't follow their development super close. But I imagine I would have heard something if they planned to drop using gtk3. From what I understand the reason they exist was to keep using gtk3.

Mint has a fork of libadwaita with added theming support, maintains xapps, which is a set of basic DE-independent desktop apps in GTK 3, and wanted to form some sort of "non-GNOME GTK alliance" with XFCE and the like (not sure if that went anywhere). There is both demand and willingness for a gnomeless GTK, and maintaining GTK 3 beyond its official lifetime will surely be part of that, especially given that GTK 3 is stable and really only needs maintenance rather than active development.

Would be funny if "alternative" GTK desktops moved over to gtk3-classic, though.

 

[Unstable Diffusion]

I'm been using Linux for around six months by now, I'll just dump my thoughts. For context, I started off on NixOS with no DE whatsoever and just built and configured everything from the ground up from the terminal, and you can call me retarded or not based on the amount of self inflicted pain:

• Fuck GNOME and their bare minimum software yet somehow-somewhat walled garden, on the other hand, also fuck KDE because I tried installing only one thing and it shat itself as it expected to have the entire environment also be KDE.
  • The software in question was the File Explorer, I like Dolphin more but God Fuck I cannot use it due to it expecting a full Plasma environment. Nautilus on the other hand has retarded shit like showing Krita or other software six gorillion times when trying to "open with" which apparently from some research it has been a long-standing issue for years because it cannot discern from duplicated or look-a-like .desktop shortcuts or something along those lines, Dolphin doesn't have this issue.
  • I kinda wanted a file explorer like Window's but there's no dice and I'm tired of researching the subject.
• Fuck MIME types, every few system updates somehow webp defaults to opening with Brave instead of nomacs, for example.
• FUCK portals and anything that has to do with portals, though the only issue I have with them now seems to be just fringe software such as WebCord
  • On this line, fuck setting up any and all freedesktop service / providers.
• I have my system with auto-login, absolutely no login / display manager and I have to manually execute the window manager every bootup in the console, though it's only just one command and thus why I haven't bothered setting anything up.
• I have no idle manager and the lock screen I have has absolutely no configuration other than displaying whenever a key was pressed or not.
• WINE and Proton are some of the best software ever made. I made a bash script to launch shit with UMU as I don't want to use Steam for non-steam stuff, and it makes it easier for me to install content such as GOG games and their DLC in a specific prefix to then delete whenever I'm done.
• I once had a power outage and the audio permanently broke, I easily (?) fixed this (???) by reinstalling the kernel via an upgrade (??????)
• I still have broken fonts in some software due to having a complete minimum setup, for example, I have no korean fonts so anything that isn't a browser doesn't even display them. I'm just that lazy.
  • Some software does not like Fcitx at all and its support ranges from "The IM buffer does not work" (Minecraft), "Keyboard input is completely ignored" (Titanfall 2) or "Keyboard input gets duplicated" (some Doom games).
• What I assume comes from NVIDIA Drivers, some of my system generations had bizarre slowdowns right away from a cold bootup which required me to reboot for it to be smooth.
• I use systemd and I still don't get why every single page of this thread for I don't know how many years has at least one post saying its shit. I just use it, it works, and I pray it keeps doing so. Maybe one day I'll be enlightened and figure out how and why avoid it.
• As my motherboard as a Bluetooth chip, I tried messing up with bluetooth to play games on Dolphin with real Wii hardware and couldn't get it to work. Haven't messed with bluetooth since.
• DeaDBeeF just werks and I'm glad it's essentially just foobar9000 but Linux. I haven't bothered with any other music player since.
• For anybody that wants to get into NixOS, avoid home manager as I can't help but feel it has overcomplicated my system setup for absolutely no reason whatsoever, even though some configurations it offers are nice.

I guess it has been fun, other than the starting 2-3 months I haven't touched my system config at all and that's why I still have stupid minor issues such as "I'm missing korean / unicode fonts" or "still booting into the terminal". I'd say that on a daily/weekly basis I get as many issues as I had with Windows, so it's not a head breaker. Fuck NixOS as an organization and their communist tranny management, but it warms my heart that there's far right and military dudes still using it, something something horseshoe theory, maybe. As someone said last month, something in the lines of "good software is good software and sometimes you gotta ignore that and make trannies seethe by continuing to use it".

 

[GNU Abyss]

I have my system with auto-login, absolutely no login / display manager and I have to manually execute the window manager every bootup in the console, though it's only just one command and thus why I haven't bothered setting anything up

I use Ly personally. Very easy to set up.

I use systemd and I still don't get why every single page of this thread for I don't know how many years has at least one post saying its shit. I just use it, it works, and I pray it keeps doing so. Maybe one day I'll be enlightened and figure out how and why avoid it.

Like hatred for niggers, jeets and the homeless, it grows on you over time. Maybe you'll like it and never feel the need to change.

I guess it has been fun, other than the starting 2-3 months I haven't touched my system config at all and that's why I still have stupid minor issues such as "I'm missing korean / unicode fonts" or "still booting into the terminal". I'd say that on a daily/weekly basis I get as many issues as I had with Windows, so it's not a head breaker.

This is why I never bothered with NixOS. I don't want to do the autistic rigamarole of functional language configs, derivations and all that other shit to maintain my desktop system. It's probably good for dev environments.

WINE and Proton are some of the best software ever made. I made a bash script to launch shit with UMU as I don't want to use Steam for non-steam stuff, and it makes it easier for me to install content such as GOG games and their DLC in a specific prefix to then delete whenever I'm done.

Oh boy, my daily dose of hatred. Look at this shit.


Looks fine, aside from that suspicious 0.5% of Rust. What do they need to pull an entire Rust dependency for?


45 lines of code. A fucking screenful of code that doesn't even touch networking - that thing Rustrannies say is inherently unsafe and requires their language. It verifies a public key, that's it.

 

[Susanna]

This is why I never bothered with NixOS. I don't want to do the autistic rigamarole of functional language configs, derivations and all that other shit to maintain my desktop system. It's probably good for dev environments.

To be fair it does have its uses in a homelab, or even on a desktop, it’s just a very unconventional distro. I add and remove devices from my network all the time because I like playing around with that stuff, and NixOS makes it ridiculously quick and easy to install and “enroll” a new computer, and keep a consistent setup between a dozen devices of very different specs over years. And while the initial setup is a massive hassle, once you’ve got it done, you’re essentially done and it will “just work” for years without touching the files again.

I have mine set up to try a rebuild boot once a week, and send a mail if that fails consecutively for three weeks. I’ve received a mail only twice, which I consider quite little considering the average of five computers running on my network at a time. If I didn’t have the NAS and the homelab and the 3D printers on NixOS, only my desktop, that would have been zero emails, because both issues were caused by a network misconfiguration I’d missed. That’s above average “just works” for any distro, I feel.

If you were setting up a basic surfing and streaming laptop for grandma or something, NixOS with a mail script like mine would probably be a very stable option, because NixOS will automatically adjust its /etc/ over time as parts of it get updated, so your configuration.nix will likely only need to be revised for truly major things (which are unlikely to appear on anything related to grandmas laptop in the first place), especially if you make the computer in question alert you directly that there is an issue.

 

[daffodils]

I have no korean fonts

Noto-Fonts-CJK (or whatever it is called on Nix) will probably take care of it.

Fuck MIME types, every few system updates somehow webp defaults to opening with Brave instead of nomacs, for example.

The whole xdg-open thing is garbage. You can easily replace it with your own simple script that won't be affected by applications randomly hogging mimetypes. It basically just takes a case statement that deals with all the file extensions you care about.

I have to manually execute the window manager every bootup

If you don't want to do that, put something like this in your shell initialization file:

[ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ] && startx

 

[GNU Abyss]

To be fair it does have its uses in a homelab, or even on a desktop, it’s just a very unconventional distro. I add and remove devices from my network all the time because I like playing around with that stuff, and NixOS makes it ridiculously quick and easy to install and “enroll” a new computer, and keep a consistent setup between a dozen devices of very different specs over years. And while the initial setup is a massive hassle, once you’ve got it done, you’re essentially done and it will “just work” for years without touching the files again.

I have mine set up to try a rebuild boot once a week, and send a mail if that fails consecutively for three weeks. I’ve received a mail only twice, which I consider quite little considering the average of five computers running on my network at a time. If I didn’t have the NAS and the homelab and the 3D printers on NixOS, only my desktop, that would have been zero emails, because both issues were caused by a network misconfiguration I’d missed. That’s above average “just works” for any distro, I feel.

If you were setting up a basic surfing and streaming laptop for grandma or something, NixOS with a mail script like mine would probably be a very stable option, because NixOS will automatically adjust its /etc/ over time as parts of it get updated, so your configuration.nix will likely only need to be revised for truly major things (which are unlikely to appear on anything related to grandmas laptop in the first place), especially if you make the computer in question alert you directly that there is an issue.

NixOS on a relative's computer is a neat idea. Guess it's finally time to beat my skill issue.

 

[Sveny Mausehund]

A while ago I bought a thinkpad and played around with artix and dwm and had a great time but didnt really have much use for it since I wasnt doing much programming at work, switched jobs recently, more prgramming now, doing lots of stuff in WSL so I though I'd ditch the middleman and just install linux directly.

New laptop is faster than the thinkpad, thought it could handle something a bit more resource intensive, downloaded the artix cinnamon iso, installed it, i was amazed no issues with like efi and grub, actually looked kinda cool but after a few minutes the system slows down until it freezes completely, cant switch to another tty, have to do a hard reset. Thought maybe cinnamon is shit installed the xfce iso, same thing. Went through amdgpu troubleshooting stuff from arch wiki, nothing helped, found some forums posts with similar issues (amdgpu related) one suggestion was downgrading mesa couldnt do it since there were lots of dependencies that also needed to be downgraded. So I thought I try devuan, maybe it still uses older versions that work, same issue. In a last ditch effort I looked for a different distrubution without systemd, found void and it actually works kinda, at least better.. But sometimes its like the display freezes just a little, hard to explain, i can still open new stuff but if I close something its still displayed.. doesnt happen often solved with a reboot, still annoying but i really like the setup so I went ahead and installed void on my desktop. I have a usb sound card and every time it boots theres a really loud popping sound coming from the speakers (sometimes even twice).

Sooo I thought maybe try a regular linux mint with systemd probably works better dont even know why im avoiding it but the same stuff is happening tried all the stuff i read on the forums nothing worked, but i dont care about the desktop, at least it somewhat works on the laptop.. maybe someone has an idea whats causing the display issues?

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

I use systemd and I still don't get why every single page of this thread for I don't know how many years has at least one post saying its shit. I just use it, it works, and I pray it keeps doing so. Maybe one day I'll be enlightened and figure out how and why avoid it.

There is a lot of stuff like that in this thread. It seems like people know they aren't supposed to like something so they don't. I definitely haven't seen most give, any reason that would actually convince someone not use, the software talked about. Especially if you've tried it already, and know it's actually fine.

Using systemd is actually nice most of the time. There are things I don't like about systemd. But systemd, on modern linux, just tends to work, and it works well. It boots fast, usually even a second or two faster than others, when I've tested them side by side. or it's about the same speed. Everything is built around it, so setting up services is usually as simple as enabling them. There are a lot of nice things that come with using systemd, and most people should probably just stick to distro's that use it. Unless they have a specific reason not to.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

This is a post linked in the arch wiki. that explains the reason they moved to it for instance.

What I don't like about systemd, is that it's basically taken over, and seems to expand further as time goes on. Over time, more software is forcing parts of systemd as a dependency. So distros that don't use it, need to either use parts of, or make something that does things like it does them. And because systemd is built specifically around things the linux kernel provides, and uses them to manage things in a more efficient way. And because linux is what most FOSS projects are built to work on, it puts the BSD's in a really bad place, when the software is made to rely on things systemd does.

Really, to sum up my issue with systemd. I like having choice in linux. And systemd to some extent doesn't give you much choice now days. But when I actually use systemd, I do like it, and it does make my life easier. I don't think I've had it make something I was trying to do harder, than on one of my non-systemd distros. It almost always is the other way around.

 

[Perfectly Innocent]

Here is a guy running a Cyberpunk 2077 test with all settings on ultra/high, full path based ray tracing enabled at 1200p with DLSS4 enabled and Frame Gen enabled while encoding the video he is screen recording using NVENC on a RTX 4070S. He has above 4G decoding and ReBar enabled, and the video highlights alt & tabbing between the game and a browser window

Sadly it doesn't feature what happens when they run completely out of dedicated VRAM.

What's being observed in the video is LACT showing the nvidia-smi output for BAR1 as providing an extra 16GB of memory from system memory, which in theory should allow for spilling over from dedicated VRAM to system memory. In reality, the numbers LACT provides are very misleading as NVIDIA still doesn't provide any usable shared memory support at the moment, neither with the proprietary module nor the open module using GSP firmware. But they have at least enabled HMM support (which can offload some things from dedicated VRAM) in one form or another, and that means we'll kinda-sorta get something closely approximating what the AMDGPU drivers can do very soon.

But what I can say, is after performing some basic testing tonight, that the situation (for me at least) is nowhere near as dire today under load as things were as little as 6-7 months ago. It's no longer a guaranteed crash every time when running out of dedicated VRAM, which is nice!

Here's what I found from testing everything again with the two latest driver branches tonight:

Using a 4070 Ti with 12GB VRAM using two 4K screens, I personally couldn't get BAR1 filled beyond 1.5GB on the 575 drivers or more than 2.5GB on the 580 drivers before encountering severe stability issues.

On the 575 drivers, when memory allocations did end up going to BAR1, the affected applications would rapidly become completely unusable (including stupidly simple things like KDE's Konsole app), the mouse pointer would begin to periodically freeze in a manner best described as being like that problem desktop Linux used to have under heavy I/O loads (if you know, you know).

With the 580 drivers I experienced much less of that, but instead, heavier applications like Firefox wouldn't render correctly (or would crash outright) if there wasn't enough dedicated VRAM immediately available, and heaven forbid if while the browser is running, the main processes VRAM gets evicted but the CUDA-using RDD process loaded up with elfarto's VAAPI drivers remains (which it will, more on that later) and is still playing a video, then I'd have audio but no video to watch and a frozen browser. Freeing up dedicated VRAM by closing whatever was hogging it would make the browser usable again though (albeit tabs would need refreshing). KDE System Settings would similarly fail to open under load, but lighter things like KWrite and KCalc would work just fine. Running two heavy video games at the same time just to push the boundaries a bit would see whichever game caught the short straw displaying a transparent window only to never render any video, as the drivers would absolutely refuse to evict the VRAM held by whoever got first dibs (interestingly, you could still "play" an invisible game of sorts, as menus could still be interacted with blindly on games like Death Stranding).

In practical terms, testing showed that NVIDIA's Linux drivers definitely still can't offload anything to system memory at all for compute memory allocations, be they OpenCL or CUDA. That would theoretically be fine, because even Windows didn't have decent support for this until 536.xx; except that on Linux, due to the lack of specialised driver paths, these limitations apply to all memory allocations belonging to application processes utilising NVDEC/NVENC (possibly VDPAU too?) and even specific parts of the Vulkan API. For gaming, it's worse as it affects anything with libraries for NVIDIA's frame generation and upscaling technologies (e.g. DLSS) loaded in even if they're not actually being used to provide those features (like every single modern Steam game running under Proton). If your process shows up in the list as C or C+G on nvidia-smi, it will hog important resources under load, and if dedicated VRAM ends up too full, things will start to fail entirely, as the drivers make no reliably meaningful attempts to evict the VRAM belonging [to anything which technically meets the limited criteria] to make more room for processes like these.

NVIDIA's drivers also cannot supplement more system memory than the total amount of dedicated GPU VRAM available to any single process, as that's how their drivers work on Linux by design. This means if a GPU only has 8GB of VRAM, but a game happens to want to try to allocate 10GB anyway (even if it's a deliberate overcommit for streaming in assets quicker during a loading screen) then it will either crash or performance will tank, depending on how critical it is for those allocations to succeed. The AMDGPU drivers and even NVIDIA's Windows drivers do not seem to have this deliberate design limitation. It doesn't look like this will be addressed any time soon either, as the driver developers seem to be working on making the existing implementation work better.

TL;DR: NVIDIA on Linux still has completely garbage VRAM management, at least for now.

(On another note as it's almost 2am here, I'll have to save writing up a quick, simple and repeatable testing methodology for later!)

 

[Akerman]

I have a usb sound card and every time it boots theres a really loud popping sound coming from the speakers (sometimes even twice).

This is for buzzing not popping, but Brodie made a video on how to fix something like this if you can stand him, don't know if it's related but worth a try perhaps:

Spoiler: TL;DR

You can temporarily stop the buzzing by running a command in your terminal. First, find your audio module name, check with cat if it's anything but 0. If it is then set its power_save option to 0. Set a modprobe if it works for it to persist on reboots.

 

[SCV]

A while ago I bought a thinkpad and played around with artix and dwm and had a great time but didnt really have much use for it since I wasnt doing much programming at work, switched jobs recently, more prgramming now, doing lots of stuff in WSL so I though I'd ditch the middleman and just install linux directly.

[rest of the post]

Sooo I thought maybe try a regular linux mint with systemd probably works better dont even know why im avoiding it but the same stuff is happening tried all the stuff i read on the forums nothing worked, but i dont care about the desktop, at least it somewhat works on the laptop.. maybe someone has an idea whats causing the display issues?

This sounds like a hardware issue. Does this happen in a live environment? Does it pass memtest? Thermals? Did windows work on the new laptop before this?

 

[Demonslayer1776]

To be fair it does have its uses in a homelab, or even on a desktop, it’s just a very unconventional distro. I add and remove devices from my network all the time because I like playing around with that stuff, and NixOS makes it ridiculously quick and easy to install and “enroll” a new computer, and keep a consistent setup between a dozen devices of very different specs over years. And while the initial setup is a massive hassle, once you’ve got it done, you’re essentially done and it will “just work” for years without touching the files again.

I have mine set up to try a rebuild boot once a week, and send a mail if that fails consecutively for three weeks. I’ve received a mail only twice, which I consider quite little considering the average of five computers running on my network at a time. If I didn’t have the NAS and the homelab and the 3D printers on NixOS, only my desktop, that would have been zero emails, because both issues were caused by a network misconfiguration I’d missed. That’s above average “just works” for any distro, I feel.

If you were setting up a basic surfing and streaming laptop for grandma or something, NixOS with a mail script like mine would probably be a very stable option, because NixOS will automatically adjust its /etc/ over time as parts of it get updated, so your configuration.nix will likely only need to be revised for truly major things (which are unlikely to appear on anything related to grandmas laptop in the first place), especially if you make the computer in question alert you directly that there is an issue.

I really love Nix conceptually but can never find the time to actually build it out. I think it would immensely benefit from an opinionated baseline configuration, something like DHH's Omarchy but with Nix as the base. It's very easy to get trapped trying to find the perfect structure for your config, and a few templates would go a long way towards getting people bootstrapped.

 

[Susanna]

I really love Nix conceptually but can never find the time to actually build it out. I think it would immensely benefit from an opinionated baseline configuration, something like DHH's Omarchy but with Nix as the base. It's very easy to get trapped trying to find the perfect structure for your config, and a few templates would go a long way towards getting people bootstrapped.

A bunch of people upload their Nix configs to GitHub, as a simple way of sharing them between their devices do version control in case they need to roll back changes. You could just find one of those you like the look of and clone it.