Cool! Hope it works out.

Absolutely +1 for flakes. It’s got some annoying UX sometimes (make sure you git add any new files before building!) but absolutely makes up for it by its features.

NixOS is indeed probably the safest way to run an “unstable” distro. No matter what you do or mess up you can always reboot back.

I (maybe) ended distrohopping last year when I gave NixOS a shot. I can’t recommend it for beginners but once you understand generally how things work on Linux (and have an interest in programming) it’s a superpower to be able to define your entire setup as a single git repository. If something ever breaks, I can reboot into an older commit and keep using my computer, or branch off in a different direction… I’ve only scratched the surface of NixOS and yet I can already make a live USB containing my setup with a single command, or deploy it (“infect”) to another machine and manage e.g my work desktop and my personal laptop sharing most settings. Also it taught me about Nix (the package manager, which also runs on any distro and macOS independent of NixOS) which I now use to set up perfect development environments for each of my projects… if I set up dependencies once (as a flake.nix shell), it’ll work forever and anywhere.

Ah I see, haven’t been on “stable” distros for a long time so I wasn’t affected. I’ve enjoyed the good support and the video stuff is definitely nice. On the AMD side, still no idea how to encode or decode anything on my Framework 16, meanwhile Intel is acing it.

Hmm, I run an Arc GPU at work without any issues. Just using plain mesa on NixOS. The Intel devs were quite responsive when we ran into issues as well.

Thanks. I’ve successfully “upstreamed” some of my patches to some courses, but sadly still most of the education is Visual Studio-based. It’s good to see more people in the new years contacting me after asking teachers about Linux and being given my name for help, but of course I want this to be a base part of the curriculum!

I did a bachelor of videogame programming in Belgium 99% on Linux (minus exams), but it was definitely a huge struggle. All the courses and assignments were Windows-only, and 90%-ish required Visual Studio (non-Code) and Windows-only libraries like DirectX or Win32. I got by writing my own tooling to auto-convert these to CMake projects and convincing each teacher to allow me to hand in CMake projects. I wrote SDL backends for most of the win32 assignments, falling back on clang’s excellent cross-compiling for stuff that requires e.g Windows.h. I wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.allpurposem.at/adventures-cross-compiling-a-windows-game-engine And using e.g DirectX natively on Linux, easier than expected: https://blog.allpurposem.at/directx

I also wrote a small wiki on my general experience + a summary of courses and main problems encountered… Windows was non-negotiable during exams: https://dae-linux.allpurposem.at/ I maintain tools, converted assignments, and information on this for future students who want to attempt something like me, but it’s hard to recommend the Linux challenge if you are totally new to programming!

Hope some of this is helpful!

Found out just now he made a video about it and explained his actual experience using it, it’s really cool! Glad to see more folks sharing this stuff.

Awesome! I hope he will help share this with more folks, the friends who I’ve talked into finally giving modern non-Ubuntu Linux a shot love it, but there’s a lot of work to get over the damaged image created by the countless “linux user installing a browser” memes. I’m sure someone with his reach can help though :)

I dual booted Ubuntu originally, but I never used it. Had to really make the jump when I installed Arch on my desktop in ~2020 because I heard it would run games better. I’ve stayed 100% on Linux since! After trying quite a few distros (Fedora, Debian, EndeavourOS, Garuda, Archcraft, more I’m forgetting) I have finally settled on NixOS… it’s been over a year and I still haven’t switched, that’s gotta be worth something :)

I like this picture of a cat that shows up every time this repo is linked. Good things are to come when this cat appears on my feed.

The “immutable” type of distros could be worth a shot. They don’t let you break the system and if anything does break, you can undo it with a reboot, so they tend to be pretty stable. My family runs a few flavors of Universal Blue, which are based on Fedora and hasn’t broken for them, but I don’t know the exact hardware. I’ve been running NixOS (also immutable) on a Framework 16 since the laptop came out, I can’t count a single hardware issue I encountered. However, NixOS does come with a steep learning curve, so it’s hard to recommend, and it also has trouble running software that hasn’t been already packaged for it.

Genuinely curious, how do they update? My server (ubuntu) yells at me every time I ssh in to reboot “as soon as possible” because “livepatch has fixed vulnerabilities”. So if you don’t reboot, you don’t get kernel updates, and your server becomes vulnerable?

My parents run a business, and besides having me install it and do the initial setup, they both use Linux fine and have adjusted great from their previous machines. I moved them to it mainly because of performance and being tired of fixing printers on Windows. LibreOffice runs, Firefox runs, a video editor works, and OBS runs, so it’s enough for their use. They’re both on Wayland, one on EndeavourOS (w/ a graphical app store set up ofc) and the other on Fedora Kinoite, w/ nouveau drivers and no issues so far!

My cybersecurity course uses Linux… in a VM. We boot into Windows 10, then start Kali in VMware and do everything inside of it. I still don’t know why, I just bring my own laptop with NixOS and add whichever package we are using to my shell.nix for that course.

My Ubuntu server (which has been working for a few years now) recently asked me in a full-screen prompt while updating something about GRUB. There was a list of partitions with just one element, which is the partition that GRUB os on. I was focused on something else so I just hit enter, but now I am really scared to reboot it. Is there any way to pull this back up or to double-check that everything is ok with the machine?

I tried this and was able to set a colorscheme in qt5/6ct that stuck in nheko (with QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct), but it still has the same icons issue in Dolphin. pcmanfm-qt also has the icons missing.

Is there a way to set catppuccin as the qt5ct theme? I tried manually adding the files but using qt5ct breaks all icons in Dolphin (it displays alt text or nothing), and kind-of applies in nheko but leaves the main window background fully white.

Agreed! I wonder how it will work if I have to reinstall, I guess I git clone my flake from the install CD and use that instead.

For Qt themes, I had Catppuccin working on Arch but I haven’t found a way to apply it. I tried Stylix (kde.enable = true does nothing for Dolphin or nheko), the official Catppuccin flake (dropped GTK support, sets QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE which breaks nheko). I know it’s possible to theme Qt apps because I’ve had it working before, but I can’t find any info on how to do it with NixOS that works…