Replying to Avatar Christiaan

I've had a very good experience with NixOS, but some little things are quite difficult to manage for a more traditionally experienced Linux user. But if you can make it work for you I'm guessing it can be a perfect distro, because it has a sanity check before you switch to the new generation. In other words you *can't* break it (I did run into a snaffu once with a VM that I didn't allocate enough desk space and didn't run the garbage collector often enough).

But if you want a rollback feature there are other ways you can achieve that. Btrfs and ZFS have atomic snapshot capability built, meaning you can make a snapshot, try some stuff and fallback to the snapshot that worked. But NixOS has that all built in ✌️😎

What are you running currently btw?
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Nate 2y ago

By far I have the most hours in Ubuntu, briefly ran Mint on a machine a long time ago. My #homelab is on Ubuntu 22.04 and my main computer is on Win11, which I'd like to move away from in favor of the privacy that Linux provides. I'd prefer to not run Ubuntu on my daily drive setup. Nix is super interesting to me but if you have other suggestions I'm all ears!

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Christiaan 2y ago

Well actually, if you like deb managed distro (but not the Snap drama surrounding #Ubuntu) you could take a look at #Debian itself. Their latest release is very much improved over the previous ones, because non-free software can be enabled with the click of the mouse in their default ISO image!

Btw if you liked the #LinuxMint aesthetic, but not the Ubuntu base then you could also try out their LMDE 6 (Linux Mint Debian Edition). They have Timeshift installed by default and if you change the default from Ext4 to Btrfs you have a great way to play with your system (the snapshotting I eluded to in my previous comment).

Otherwise I'd say just experiment with different distributions. In VMs or separate drives. You do you! ✌️😎

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Nate 2y ago

Snap and all that drama is a big part of why I want to explore outside of Ubuntu. Thanks for this! Will definitely spin up some VMs and test drive some things.