My reason against using Guix is software availability. NixOS repos are just larger, and I like that on NixOS unfree software can be enabled with a single line.

Maybe a kiosk compositor which displays only a single app works well for this use case.

https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage

I recommend unplugging all disks with important data beforehand. Piece of mind about not being able to wipe all data (and having to restore from your backup) is great. Having used fdisk or parted is a good experience to have in case it’s actually needed on some server.

I’m helping a friend out with his laptop from time to time. They’ve used Linux Mint XFCE for many years and it’s set to auto update. Now I got asked to help since the system stopped auto updating with an error message every boot. Seems like an issue with dpkg but I didn’t have time so I don’t know how to.fix it yet.

Another device is running Fedora Silverblue for a year or two and the only issue was an update failing because of some dependencie issue. But simply removing all overlayed packages and installing them again fixed it in no time.

I’ve also been using NixOS for a few months on my pc, laptop and server and it’s great. Image based OS aren’t flexible enough for my liking but are great for low maintenance setups.

I started using Linux with a dual-boot and always booted back into Windows because it worked better since I set it up right and was confortable with it. Only booting Linux and taking the time to understand how to do whatever I want to do finally made me comfortable enough to wipe that partition.

So my recommendation is don’t be discouraged if things seem hard or annoying, it will definitely get better over time.

Chew