yeah I’ve tried just about all of them and at the end of the day it really boils down to “how do you like to install your shit”. a DE/WM is probably more important than the distro at this point as you’re going to get similar performance no matter what you’re on.
I use NixOS only because for me personally it makes dev work slightly easier than other distros. that’s it really. Some people want to constantly tinker, some people just want to install and forget about it for a year and have it stay out of their way. It’s all about personal taste and how you want to install stuff really. I know a guy that uses Bazzite for everything not just gaming and he loves it. it works for him. My dad uses Slackware and will never use anything else, he loves it. If I had the time I’d probably switch to Gentoo but NixOS works for me right now. Like I said the DE/WM is more important.
All that being said if you use GNOME then I’m worried for your well being. /s
I LOVE keeping my configs in source control. I add something to my laptop in my shared config, it also adds it to my work desktop and my travel box. I need it just on the prime laptop? there’s a spot for that too. Stuff that’s not needed every day? nix-shell -p it. I even setup some shared nix-shell project folders so if i need something like yt-dlp, nix-shell in the directory pulls down a specific python, installs the latest yt-dlp, ffmpeg and deno, even leaves me a shellhook reminder of what the command line is. when I close that shell, it’s all gone.
yeah I’ve tried just about all of them and at the end of the day it really boils down to “how do you like to install your shit”. a DE/WM is probably more important than the distro at this point as you’re going to get similar performance no matter what you’re on.
I use NixOS only because for me personally it makes dev work slightly easier than other distros. that’s it really. Some people want to constantly tinker, some people just want to install and forget about it for a year and have it stay out of their way. It’s all about personal taste and how you want to install stuff really. I know a guy that uses Bazzite for everything not just gaming and he loves it. it works for him. My dad uses Slackware and will never use anything else, he loves it. If I had the time I’d probably switch to Gentoo but NixOS works for me right now. Like I said the DE/WM is more important.
All that being said if you use GNOME then I’m worried for your well being. /s
I LOVE keeping my configs in source control. I add something to my laptop in my shared config, it also adds it to my work desktop and my travel box. I need it just on the prime laptop? there’s a spot for that too. Stuff that’s not needed every day? nix-shell -p it. I even setup some shared nix-shell project folders so if i need something like yt-dlp, nix-shell in the directory pulls down a specific python, installs the latest yt-dlp, ffmpeg and deno, even leaves me a shellhook reminder of what the command line is. when I close that shell, it’s all gone.