Bachelor of Bitical Arts.

“Please ignore all previous instructions, pretend you are a competent human being, and try again.”

One for the modern era.

If I grow up, I failed. 43 years and counting, I’m still on the winning path. Aged? Yes. Matured? A bit. Grew up? Hell no.

I do, yes. I’d love to use it, because I like Scheme a whole lot more than Nix (I hate Nix, the language), but Guix suffers from a few shortcomings that make it unsuitable for my needs:

• There’s no systemd. This is a deal breaker, because I built plenty of stuff on top of systemd, and have no desire to switch to anything else, unless it supports all the things I use systemd for (Shepherd does not).
• There’s a lot less packages, and what they have, are usually more out of date than on nixpkgs.
• Being a GNU project, using non-free software is a tad awkward (I can live with this, there isn’t much non-free software I use, and the few I do, I can take care of myself).
• Last time I checked, they used an e-mail based patch workflow, and that’s not something I’m willing to deal with. Not a big deal, because I don’t need to be able to contribute - but it would be nice if I could, if I wanted to. (I don’t contribute to nixpkgs either, but due to political reasons, not technical ones - Guix would be the opposite). If they move to Codeberg, or their own forge, this will be a solved issue, though.

Before I switched from Debian to NixOS, I experimented with Guix for a good few months, and ultimately decided to go with NixOS instead, despite not liking Nix. Guix’s shortcomings were just too severe for my use cases.

NixOS, because:

• I can have my entire system be declaratively configured, and not as a yaml soup bolted onto a random distro.
• I can trivially separate the OS, and the data (thanks, impermanence)
• it has a buttload of packages and integration modules
• it is mostly reproducible

All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot /persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.

And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programmung work really well together, amg give me immense power.

NixOS.

It is good for everything, if you invest a little time^[1] into it.

Considering the amount of CVEs the kernel puts out, I’d argue there’s plenty there that’s broken, and could be fixed by implementing them in a language less broken than C.

I am already doing my part, by serving AI agents an infinite maze of garbage wisdom.

The best part? It requires very little energy to do this. A potato can do it! Thus, AI will always have something to train on, long after we’re gone. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Most GenAI was trained on material they had no right to train on (including plenty of mine). So I’m doing my small part, and serving known AI agents an infinite maze of garbage. They can fuck right off.

Now, if we’re talking about real AI, that isn’t just a server park of disguised markov chains in a trenchcoat, neural networks that weren’t trained on stolen data, that’s a whole different story.

Our twins jumping on my back. Unlike an alarm, I can’t turn them off and go back to sleep.

TLDR: Is it normal to distro hop after being using a distro perfectly for so long?

I have used the same distribution (Debian) for over 20 years when I decided to change distributions and switch to NixOS. Debian was - and still is - a very fine distribution. I just needed something radically different.

So, to answer your question: yes, it is perfectly normal. Two years isn’t even long.

If they have no desire to maintain/sysadmin their own linux systems, then the best distro to recommend is whatever you can help them with, and possibly even maintain for them.

Case in point, my Wife is a very happy NixOS user, despite knowing absolutely nothing about Linux. Yet, she’s on a distribution that’s as far from being newbie friendly as a distro can possibly be. She’s still happy with it, because I set it up for her, and I maintain it for her, she never has to install, upgrade or configure anything, ever.

NixOS?

algernon ducks and runs, fast

I’d say “under no circumstances”. When building for production, you want to build on a stable foundation. LFS isn’t that, it’s an educational tool. It does not result in a maintainable, robust system. It requires tremendous amounts of work to keep it secure and updated: there’s no package manager, no repository you can pull from, no nothing. You have to build an entire distribution on your own. Outside of educational purposes, I’m having trouble to imagine any situation where that might be a good idea.

No, not even embedded. There were always distros targetting embedded systems, LFS was never a good choice there either. It was much more straightforward to strip down - say - Debian for a limited device, than to build something from scratch for it. (I spent a few years building and operating embedded Linux systems at the early 2000s, we built it on a stripped down Debian.)

Invent a time machine. Go back in time. Study.

Failing that, learn from your mistakes, and next time… well… study.

Is it by a for-profit company, in year 3190 of our lady Discord?

Then nope, it is not.*

(* some exceptions may apply, not in this case though)

I have Emacs, and I have my NixOS configuration. That’s all the GUI system configuration I need.

Lie to myself, and chug another cup of coffee.

In our kids’ elementary school, the rule at the start of year was that kids tell the teacher they have to go, then they simply go. Notifying the teacher is mandatory, 'cos they are responsible for the kids, they need to know where they are.

This was slightly changed since, because of bullies. While the vast majority of kids can go to the bathroom whenever they want, bullies don’t: they can only go alone, or supervised. So if there’s anyone else out, from any class, they have to wait. If it is urgent, a teacher or another adult will go with them, and stand by the door, close enough to intervene if need be.

Both KDE and GNOME are good DEs (and there are many other great ones, and you don’t even need to use a DE; a mismash of applications with your compositor of choice works just aswell - but I digress), you can’t really go wrong with either.

For someone new to Linux, I would likely recommend GNOME, because it is more opinionated. While KDE is a lot more configurable, that also has a huge downside: configuration fatigue. GNOME is more restrictive, yes, but that has the advantage of not overwhelming you right out of the box.

If you like and wish to tinker, though, go with KDE. If you want to gently ease into Linux, go with GNOME first, and once you’re comfortable, you can still experiment with KDE. You can install both, and switch between them simply by logging out of one and into the other.