Don’t? Arch is less scary and more annoying.
NixOS
gnu guix?
Arch is fine… It has good documentation.
NixOS or Gentoo is probably my pick.
deleted by creator
Or Linux from scratch
Who TF is scared by Mint?
Did a clean upgrade/install of Mint about 10 hours ago. I’m back to business as usual. Minor tweaks, no tinkering.
The nixOS slander in these comments would be valid if nixOS were simply a distro and not a cult…
To scare them? Windows.
It’s the absolute best way to make someone become a Linux user for life.:-)
NixOS:
Gentoo:
Neither existed when I installed Linux the first time.
When was this? Arch Linux was initially released in 2002, about a year before I tried knoppix for the first time.
What was your first distro, unless you used Linux before distros, if so what was your first installation experience like?
Around '97, playing with MKLinux.
Nyarch
When I was first looking into Linux I asked the only friend I knew who used it and he unironically recommended me Arch…
A year later I actually gave Arch a try, but by then he apparently hated Arch and switched to Gentoo and I stopped asking him for advice at that point.
I switched from Arch to Gentoo, for me it’s just the next step of taking advantage of every last bit of my hardware. But unless you are seriously invested, I would never recommend Gentoo to someone. If you just want something that’s up to date, go with Fedora. If you have some spare time, go with Arch. If you have no hobbies at all, go with Gentoo.
I dunno, apart from compile times, Gentoo is the simplest distribution ever. I have way more problems with my Arch or Ubuntu (Neon) installations.
he apparently hated Arch and switched to Gentoo
I have been using Arch for a half a decade at this point and its worked out well for me. I like how its very stable despite being bleeding edge (relatively speaking). It’s made gaming a lot easier, and I was pleasantly surprised when Valve announced SteamOS was switching to it as a base.
A lot of people have varying levels of purism when it comes to linux, and it sounds like your friend dipped his toes in with Arch and realized “not pure enough” and then jumped in on the deep end with Gentoo. At the end of the day, Linux is Linux no matter which distro you pick, but each distro highlights different strengths and weaknesses of it. Its all about the package managers, the repository contents, and the maintainers. Occasionally, technical support might matter.
So, pick whichever distro you like, move around a bit to see what has the least papercuts for you, and then stick with that until you can’t anymore.
very stable despite being bleeding edge
Try testing. And be just as amazed as me on how stable even that is. It literally runs on my main server. The one that, if it goes down, everything of me is down. Yet, I never had problems, for years.
NixOS: How do I install OBS?
edit /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
locate environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
and add
linuxPackages.v4l2loopback (wrapOBS { plugins = with pkgs.obs-studio-plugins; [ obs-backgroundremoval obs-shaderfilter obs-vintage-filter ]; })Then you need to install the kernel driver
you can find the instructions here:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/OBS_Studio
make sure you follow the part about boot.extraModulePackages = with config.boot.kernelPackages; [ v4l2loopback ];
if you want to use the virtual cam driver.
You may find out that you want to install this in home-manager or flakes instead, but those are novels themselves.
edit: ohh yeah almost forgot run
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
after you edit the configs to install
NixOS: How do I update the version of OBS after it’s installed?
sudo nix-channel --update
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
If it breaks, the errors are mostly unhelpful, you need to poke around and make educated guesses.
If it bricks you can go back to the previous version in grub by selecting the second to the top entry
make sure you garbage collect every now and then or the app store gets huge.
It’s actually easier than that, but I know what you mean. Yesterday I installed arch on a new laptop, after two years of NixOS. I think I might swich the desktop too.
I’ve been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I recently noped out of NixOS. It’s a great concept, but I’m old and I don’t want to spend the rest of my days configuring stuff just to get to where I would be in 30 minutes on a less rigorously designed distro.
That is, until your distro releases an update and you’re like “what do you mean the update failed? So does that mean the update script rolled the changes back?” and then you find out your entire system is in a half updated state and you need to clean install
Ever heard of btrfs snapshots and immutable?
Yes, that’s why I’d like to run something as clean as NixOS. For now my compromise is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s btrfs snapshots.
I’m in an interesting place because I installed tumbleweed as a server. At some point there was a change to networking and when I updated, networking didn’t work anymore, so I had to roll back to just before the update. I don’t want to start from scratch, and I don’t want to either bring a screen to it and troubleshoot what’s going on again. I tried in the past, and after a few hours of getting nothing (everything should be fine, it just doesn’t send or receive anything), I rolled it back and walked away. I have a feeling I just need to run yast and reconfigure there after updating, I just don’t want to go through the effort of fixing it because it still runs fine.
Came here to say NixOS too. The idea behind it is neat but the implementation is the most obtuse Rube Goldberg machine I can imagine.
For me, it felt like old times. Bringing up slackware, then bringing up redhat, then fighting in laptop Nvidia and AMD drivers. I was scary how much of my existing knowledge was useless though. If you install it by the book, you can’t even run a linked library.
I spent a couple of hundred hours learning how to configure it. I’ve been running it for around a year and a half. I’m still sub-par. First time around, 23.11, I installed home-manager as a flake. I got it up and running in a couple of hours, but managed to wedge myself when it was time for updates. I had written just enough weird nix language to make my configs not work in 24.05. I could get the OS to come up, but not home-manager. I started fresh, taking old configs item by item and re-implemented them via the docs fresh.
When I got a new laptop, I booted off the USB, copied my home folder and grabbed configuration.nix and home.nix and it all just magically worked.
That said, NGL, 25.05 has me a bit worried :) But at least I don’t have to fight Wayland this time.
That’s way, way more time and effort than I’m willing to waste on getting my computer up and running, and I still fail to see any real benefit over copying my Arch home folder and reinstalling what I need from Pacman/AUR. If I had to set up dozens of computers at a time then yes, absolutely, Nix would be perfect!
that’s fair
I thought that was the ONLY distro…?!
I’m planning to go Arch on my secondary that had popos on it. I’ve only used mint and Ubuntu before.
I honestly don’t think Arch is that bad or complicated. It’s just that you have to go into it knowing that you’re in for some reading, tinkering and following step by step instructions along the way. I’d start with something like Mint or Ubuntu for a first look for sure. But once you’re ready to learn a bit more about how the Linux system works and is put together, Arch would straight up be my first recommendation. Even if it’s something you play with on the side in a virtual machine, for me at least, starting on Arch was when my Linux experience went from clicking at things and copy pasting commands into the terminal to still copying and pasting commands lol, but actually learning why and how and what too.
