You can keep your Plasma release, I’m happy to wait.
Fedora is just a straight line, as I’ve found.
The answer: Fedora
You’re welcome.
But I don’t want to use American software 🤷
Opensuse is also great: Like Fedora its rpm-based and backed by a corpo and with Tumbleweed you’ll get a nice rolling release experience without worries that it’s gonna bork itself
Fedora is the best. My friend who recently started using Linux persuades me to install NixOS (which I’ve already tried 2 years ago), but I really can’t leave Fedora. Everything just works and are up to date.
Bazzite is already pictured, and OP already complains that it’s too boring!
Nix
I adore the idea of nix. I fucking hate the syntax with a passion.
oh use the
.packagesbut only for this else use a flake and if you want dot files there is this other completely different thing with home manager but if you want this extra config customization or a custom system script then you need to make a derrivatio…its so damn exhausting.
I just want a list of packages.
That I can put in modules.
And turn them on and off based on the computer I’m on.
And if they are on they should use these dots.
And not look like a spaghetti bowl made of curly braces sourced from json derulos left buttock.
And the system should also have some additional sbctl hooks because we still have not figured out that dracut generated initramfs files don’t get purged from the database so I have to have a custom hook to not get error messages every time I
paruahahahAAHAHA…anyway dcli exists and is a fine middle ground.
No
Yes
Come to the dark side, we’ve got new Plasma, and exhausting manual configuration
It’s there to solve your “This is boring” issue without having to do all of the system configuration stuff manually*.
I was able to package a nightly AppImage as if it were installed normally like an app, and I could reinstall the system if I wanted to, and it’d still be there. NixOS is the opposite of manual dependency resolution, it’s dependency heaven. You can have unstable and stable repositories side-by-side, living in a utopic egalitarian society. You can write a configuration file that does everything. You can do anything with NixOS. NixOS is the one true god, all hail NixOS—
Ah, I see why you may not want to use it. Consider it though, it’s genuinely good and trying doesn’t hurt.
I haven’t even told you about nix-comma or nix helper (nh) yet. May the, uh, flake be with you.
*You do have to write the config files, though you can just adapt someone else’s configuration.
You can have unstable and stable repositories side-by-side, living in a utopic egalitarian society.
The NixOS-communist intersectionality is something I never expected to come across, but it makes so much sense lmao. This is 100% true.
nix
Slackware in 2026? Didn’t know it was still around
It’s not a “hip” distro but it is very much used, just not talked about.
Yeah, but in my experience it isn’t great. Salix is a lot nicer.
Of course, your mileage may vary. There are definitely still a lot of true slackers out there!
A boring OS is a healthy OS.
Yeah, that’s me comfortably sitting on Bazzite right now. There are definitely ways for it to improve, but I’ve only really ever had one issue in the last few months, and that was fixed the next week. I just get to use my computer, and it’s nice.
Did you also have an issue booting due to some network driver issue on 43.20260309? I had to rpm-ostree rollback to 43.20260217 a couple weeks ago. Besides that, Bazzite has indeed been very smooth sailing.
I was about to say! Who the hell thinks their computer being reliable is boring!?
People who like fixing things.
Yeah but I like to tinker when I chose to tinker. Not randomly when I’m trying to get work done
I am one of those people, but I’m still annoyed when my tools don’t work right. I hate having to fix something, only to find out that my tool I need for that also needs repairs. I use my computer’s primarily as tools, so I almost always am at least a little annoyed when my computer demands attention all of a sudden.
Maybe there are others that are hobbyists. I guess if you’re a computer tinkerer primarily, troubleshooting that crap can be like cultivating a zen garden, but it is the opposite for me.
I totally understand. That’s why I have a working Mac and a sometimes working Linux machine.
back when i used to get burgled regularly, it was great. forced us out of the flat for a while before the insurance came in, far better than wasting time on pointless computance.
Install a random distro once a week for the next 6 months.
I think I just reached the point where my NixOS is configured exactly as I want, so now the system just works and works without me changing anything. 😭 I’m gonna have to start having sex since I can no longer justify it on the lack of time.
Don’t show this image to my girlfriend
Literally me.
Which one?
Is it sad that I knew at a glance what that code is doing?
Both
Oh please. Be real. Are you sure there’s nothing in your flake to refactor or modularize? :)
Sure is, but do I wanna do it? 🤓
You mean, spend 4-6 days tearing your hair out, before landing on a solution which evaluates to literally the same output as your current version, but is 10% cleaner and more elegant?
Of course you do, after all, that satisfies that itch. Well. For a while, anyways…
Sigh… if you put it that way, I can probably take another glance through my config for that one line I can trim down.
He can upgrade from
22.05to25.11, I guess?
I hit that point, needed to add a few things and changed settings around, and everything broke. I tinker with little things way too much to use Nix.
I‘m sure there’s a window manager you haven’t explored yet.
For sure, the thing is I’m satisfied. Like I actually am, I have the system I want, there is nothing else I’m curious to try. 😭
Congratulations. You can do actual work now.
Time to “accidentally” break something
For my bare metal personal systems, I just use Debian stable with backports. When that does not suffice, I manually build and install things from source.
debian unstable
Tumbleweed somehow gives me the newest Plasma with neither configuration nor manual dependency resolution exhaustion. It is not perfect either but it squares the circle of a stable rolling release distro surprisingly well.
Do people really be using Slackware these days? I’m on Bazzite atm and it’s cool but a bit different esp with the ostree stuff.
Curious what the use case is for Slackware nowadays
Slack is great when you need to make something completely out of the ordinary. It’s right there just one step removed from a system from scratch without GNU.
That said, embedded computers nowadays run full Debian. So I dunno what use it still has.
A few thousand people in the world, yes.
It combines the stability of Debian with the simplicity of Arch, and turns both up to 11.
Main selling point is that it never does anything unexpected.
You set it up and then it works the way you’re used to, literally for decades.Feeling superior to Gentoo and Arch users.
I see the main use case for Slackware, if you’re a Linux graybeard, who has used it for 20 years.
Roll with Debian Testing? Or even SID?
Debian Testing kinda sucks, it’s like the worst of both worlds of Debian and Arch; updates for some packages can be held back for months because of some blocker, while stable at least gets fastracked to important fixes for security or system stability, and Sid just naturally gets them faster because it’s more up to date. Sid is probably better overall, but why use an unstable rolling release without all the convenience that Arch’s tools offer? AFAIK pacman is really nice for stuff like making your own packages. Plus it has a much larger user base than Debian Sid, which helps when you’re looking for a fix for recent issues.
And in the center of the graph you can find Fedora.
Far from perfect but the exact middle groundNixOS manages to be all of these at once except the manual dependency management
NixOS is indirect manual dependency management.
And to cover complexity, I just let an LLM do most of the work - it knows more about NixLang than me anyway (though I can read it).
