With that, I’m starting a contest (the prize is the honor of being texted by me that you won):

Guess how much it will take me to break the system beyond repair. I will deliberately do stupid things such as using random niche bootloaders, bcachefs and whatever else is suggested in comments.

If I can’t break the system in like 2 weeks, I’m installing that NixOS config regardless of this challenge.

Yep, that’s it. Thanks for participation and don’t break your system.

Edit: I’m not going with bcachefs. Thanks Linus

  • FedX@quokk.auEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    I have used quite a number of “enthusiast” distros. Arch, Alpine, Void, NixOS, briefly Rawhide, others I am forgetting, and most recently Chimera. Arch is by far the simplest, easiest and stablest distro I have ever used, at least for what I want out of my computer.

  • RustyNova@lemmy.world
    5·
    12 hours ago

    Fedora will break when the kernel update to a version incompatible with the current Nvidia drivers. Happened twice to me. Happened to a friend. It’s not if fedora will break, but when.

    Anyways. Good luck on your future nix journey. I recommend switching to a flake config asap and putting it in a git repo for easy rollback. Don’t use the dendritic pattern as a beginner. This will only make things harder (ask how I know…)

    • HumbleBragger@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      That’s the reason I came back to Debian after 3 years of fedora. Every major kernel update (sometime even a minor one) broke my shitty nvidia card driver.

      • RustyNova@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 hours ago

        TBF it’s mostly a fedora issue to not wait for the Nvidia drivers to be compatible to release the kernel.

        Never had a problem on nixos despite being rolling release and using the same proprietary drivers

    • garbage_world@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      12 hours ago

      According to wakatime, which I have to use, I have over 100 hours spent on writing my config alone.

      Thanks for advice nonetheless, if I were a beginner it would helpful.

    • garbage_world@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      12 hours ago

      Gentoo isn’t even that unstable. The main pain point when using it is the installation or not hitting the binary cache

      • Supercrunchy@programming.dev
        1·
        8 hours ago

        I agree! On gentoo even if you do manage to break your system you’d also know how to fix it (since you basically spent days installing it by hand…).

        I ran it on my pc for a few years and the only source of breakage were nvidia drivers (in the past they sucked possibly even more). I remember running it using VESA drivers for like a week until I figured out how to fix it.

        It’s really nice how much you can customize it and make it really fit your own use-case. I once ran it in a fully offline raspberry pi for 5-10 years (without updates) and it was rock solid. The hard disk it ran on and the power adapter died, but the sd card was mounted read-only so it lasted the full 10 years without any corruption. I kept a backup of the root filesystem on the sd-card so restoring it to a new disk was super-easy. I also ran the hdd in btrfs raid-1 mode with a itself (two partitions), so that it could self-recover from random corruption due to power losses (I’m not sure it’s a good idea, but it never caused any trouble) It was just running 1 service and that’s it, without any monitor or keyboard connected. I even made a small program with a single-key interface to run admin commands directly without needing a screen or any login (press “b”=reboot, “s” for btrfs scrub, for example). Trying to customize, say, an ubuntu like that would have been a nightmare. It took forever to compile everything on the raspberry pi though.

  • lemmysmash@piefed.socialEnglish
    10·
    17 hours ago

    You obviously should ditch the package manager and install everything with ./configure --prefix=/usr && make && make install. And no, I didn’t miss sudo in front of make install, I missed it in front of su - :)

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    12 hours ago

    XFS with LUKS2 using serpent-xts-512b to really nuke that IO with limited hardware acceleration lol.

    I tried this once as a test and it was surprisingly usable, though I didn’t try any heavy IO operations.

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
      7·
      18 hours ago

      Root on fat32

      I don’t think that’s even actually possible with modern distros. Symlinks are used everywhere and FAT has no concept of setuid.

    • rozodru@piefed.worldEnglish
      4·
      20 hours ago

      nah go with DWL or DWM with several patches. use ST and dmenu and patch those too. Patch the bar several times then try to add systray.

    • garbage_world@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      21 hours ago

      Sway isn’t even that unstable. I want to use plasma devel/git/whatever is the newest, because I want to check a few things.

    • trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      6·
      20 hours ago

      I’ve always seen fans call it “cutting edge” or “leading edge”, as it’s somewhere between other distros with it shipping most feature updates once every six months.

      Personally, I prefer something more up-to-date, but at least you don’t typically get stuff in the Fedora repos that’s so out of date, that it’s actively broken.
      For example, for $DAYJOB, I need the reuse CLI, which states in its documentation to install it with apt install reuse. On Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, that’s just a dumb idea, because the version in the repos is 3 years old and crashes when you go to use it, producing subtly wrong results. That cost us half a day of debugging this week, for no good reason…