Re:SnowflakeOS: Beginner friendly and GUI focused NixOS variant
by thower34234324 on Wednesday July 31, 2024 @10:38PM
(#41125703)
In fairness, nixos is way easier to setup than arch; it also has a stable channel. The sharp bits only come to bite when you want to touch nix-lang (eg. write a flake; create a new package etc.).
Re:SnowflakeOS: Beginner friendly and GUI focused NixOS variant
by darthrupert on Thursday August 01, 2024 @03:46AM
(#41126998)
Yeah this is accurate. I've installed arch several times over the last decade and can mostly do it by heart without consulting the docs... but the amount of possible choices is just crazy and keeps going up.
Also, things like disk encryption is easy to get wrong, leading to another boot from the usb/mount everything/fix loop.
Nix has a graphical installer, which makes most of these choices for you. Different projects have added similar installers on top of Arch too, making its indtallation as easy.
And in actual use Arch is much simpler.
But, yeah, Nix can be really nasty to troubleshoot because of the lack of information. The Nix documentation is still PITA, and the much of usual Linux guides (which are everywhere on the internet) won't apply to Nix systems. You have to learn a lot.
If what you want is a simple system with a web browser and some games, this should mostly work, but Fedora Silverblue would provide much more integrated and solid DE for that purpose. Being image-based release-based distro, it does offer pretty decent UX. Nix is rolling release, and everything is scattered just like Arch.