I’m new to #Lemmy and making myself feel at home by posting a bit!
My first Linux distribution was elementary OS in early March 2020. Since then, I’ve tried Manjaro, Arch Linux, Fedora, went back to Manjaro, and since early January 2023, I’ve landed on Debian as my home in the #Linux world.
What was your first Linux distro?
I actually wanted Arch but everyone was saying that you HAD to do a manual install first and I had been miserably failing at doing it in a WM for a few weeks. I had finally decided to try it directly on hardware so that I had no choice but to complete it if I wanted to use my laptop, and just as was about to burn the ISO on a USB stick the power went out and my hard drive died 😑 On a saturday evening, obviously…
All I had was a Haiku USB I had made to check it out, and a Linux Mint USB a friend lent me that I hadn’t tried because I assumed I would hate it. So I used Haiku for about 30 minutes (let’s say it had a few bugs), and Mint for the rest of the weekend and did, in fact, absolutely hate it (Windows PTSD 😭 ).
So until the computer store opened on Monday, I spend 48 hours browsing the web to find a better distro and when I got my new SSD I installed AntiX, because it was very light and likely to run well on my potato-grade laptop, it came without a DE and 7 different window managers to try (which seemed cool at the time, but I didn’t actually try any of them except the default one IceWM and after a few weeks I installed i3 😅 ) and also because YouTube had convinced me that systemd was the Antechrist (thanks YouTube 😑 ).
After two months I decided to try Manjaro on my other laptop… it didn’t go well : incompatible dependencies preventing updates, Nvidia + Wayland making games not display correctly, and if I had to fix all that manually what’s the point I just might as well use regular Arch. So I gave up after 48 hours and decided to install Arch, and just as I booted from the Arch ISO the laptop died (fan malfunction) and I had to send it back 😑.
After three months, the third laptop, bought with the refund from the second one, did actually allow me to install Arch without throwing a fit 🥳 using archinstall to preserve my mental health this time.
Arch has been really great but I need to switch to a bigger SSD and I am probably going to try Nix because it seems really cool 🤩
As an Arch user who spun up NixOS for a few months; it’s worth it. It will take weeks to perfectly set up and it could take months to properly learn nixlang, but what you get is a solid, unbreakable, reproducible distro. Move over your dotfiles, home-manager, and nixconfigs and you essentially have the same setup on any other PC (though you may have to alter the video driver config).
I had my nixfiles all modular. My nouveau video drivers for the ancient laptop I was using? Imported from a separate config. That way I could leave anything hardware related behind and draw up new hardware configs for the system I was moving to when the time came. Don’t like your DE? Comment it out and write in whatever else you want to try.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love and use Arch on my main machine. Its just that my dive down the NixOS rabbit hole was really fun and I haven’t even tried flakes.