If you’re running unstable system packages, immutability won’t really save your stability.

So don’t complicate it, and just use Debian with nix and home-manager. That way you have a stable base, and you can create a list of bleeding edge packages that should be installed. In any case it should be essentially only docker + whatever can’t be dockerised.

Nice, thanks

That’s a really hacky method and should not be in the manual tbh.

That’s why I’m asking, it seemed really odd.

home-manager

Thanks, this makes a lot more sense. Any good resources besides the wiki? Is there a way to break down home.packages into smaller chunks for modularity?

As for flakes: No, you don’t require them to do any of this. They solve an entirely different problem.

So they’re just to ensure reproducibility?

The first time I installed Fedora after like a decade I updated to new minor version -> sudo reboot because I was already in the terminal -> reinstalled because it wouldn’t boot anymore

IDK about KDE, but Nobara gnome has Wayland and xorg entries in the login manager.

Btw Fedora is removing x11 support, so that’s going to be fun for everyone who’s having issues with Wayland.

1. Arch wiki - installation. You’re installing a lot of those components yourself, so it lists out common options.

Is this approach even valid?

Not really. People don’t replace an audio server for example if everything is working, and the default choices are almost universal.

2. Go to a social media like this one, and observe nerds arguing about distros.

3. Emacs, Firefox, kmonad

4. That depends on the distro, but something like (if necessary): enable nonfree repos, install proprietary drivers, install proprietary codecs, install stuff you need for work.

5. No, unless you’re a bloat obsessed supermodel.

6. You’ve got two main things to worry about at this stage: release cycle and preferred DE.

All three of those are Ubuntu derivatives so they get updates on pretty much the same schedule. But they’ve got different default DEs in cinnamon, gnome, and KDE. That doesn’t mean you can’t install xfce on mint, but their dev time is focused on cinamon so xfce looks like ass in comparison.

Take a flash drive, install ventoy, and try out their live environments. After a few reboots you’ll have a clearer idea of what you’re looking for.

I’d also try something slightly different and include Nobara. It’s also a stable workstation distro, but it’s got a shorter release cycle and it’s based on Fedora instead of Ubuntu. Also, it might be interesting to compare pop gnome, nobara gnome, and classic gnome.

However, I am not looking for windows-like. I want a new & fresh experience like using a smartphone for the first time or switching from ios to android.

Be careful what you wish for or you’ll end up with guix running stumpwm, and you’ll sympathise with your grandparents using a PC for the first time.

But seriously, use gnome in that case, and maybe try out a tiling WM like i3. Gnome is the only big DE to go down a different UI route after being threatened with litigation by Microsoft. Tiling managers are IMO the best, but it takes a while to get them really set up.

Well you solved that conundrum rightly. Now let’s go linch those dirty Apple and John Deere engineers. Since they’ve designed those machines, they must be the only responsible parties for designing them with their extreme anti-consumer and anti-repair policies. They must get commissions on every licensed repair or something, it’s definitely got nothing to do with capitalists putting restrictions on the design team in order to increase profits, nope…

I thought I would stick with Debian

There’s your first mistake. Don’t run a server distro on a workstation if you don’t want to deal with it’s downsides.

I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it

Read the CUPS Arch wiki page

do you people think Ubuntu will work for me?

Fuck Ubuntu. Use Mint if you want to try something Ubuntu based.

I’ve recently went through a bunch of stable distros and Nobara had the best experience out of the box.

IÄ! IÄ! CTHULHU FHTAGN!