Oh it almost certainly won’t save you time unless you already know Nix and how the ecosystem works. But it does make rolling back to previous configurations basically effortless, which seems like it would obviate your need for a full staging drive.

Sounds like you could benefit from NixOS ;)

Note: the growing the partition from a live USB thing is only necessary if you want it all to be one partition. If it’s a separate drive, or even if it’s not, you can just format the old Windows partition/drive and mount it as a new storage volume.

Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone’s time.

I know that and you know that, but have you seen the sort of thing Trump and those who have his ear think is a good idea?

I don’t think they’d just ban using all open source software, it’d be something ridiculous like asserting that all FOSS licenses are null and void and those projects are now the intellectual property of the US. Likely propped up by the classic “security” justification.

I’m less worried about any specific targeting of Linux than I am about some random tech bro whispering in Trump’s ear and suddenly he bans Open Source or something similarly unenforceable and insane.

I have dailied Arch and Debian unstable and they both took about as much effort. Arch is really not that complex, it just gives you access to some potential footguns. Also, Arch absolutely makes it clear that it’s a more advanced distro – that’s the entire reason for the meme, although these days it’s a lot simpler thanks mostly to the installers.

Having dailied both as well, I only agree once you’re over the very significant learning curve. And even then, I’d say initial setup is pretty similar, if not a bit easier on Arch.

Arch and NixOS are kind of like C and Rust. Arch/C give you the power and flexibility to do pretty much whatever you want, but also will let you do it in very stupid ways that will come back to bite you. NixOS and Rust give you the same amount of power, but with a higher barrier to entry that ensures you have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing, which results in a much more stable experience.

As long as they’re not for the core Fedora projects why not? Bugs for those should be scarce and there are many other users to report them anyway.

Using and contributing to FOSS is hardly scabbing regardless. Unless you’re donating to the project I wouldn’t consider even bug reporting as directly supporting IBM. The tangible profit to them is pennies if that.

What’s your point of comparison, Ubuntu LTS? Arch does not require nearly as much upkeep or attention as you’re claiming. Try setting up a Gentoo or NixOS system, or better yet just do Linux From Scratch, and come back to us.

Gentoo certainly teaches you a lot, but I would never recommend it to an average user. If you want to get any benefit from use flags for any packages, you will be compiling them from scratch and possibly their dependencies as well. Small packages are pretty fast, sure, but if you try to do something like compile Firefox, you could be waiting all day for that if you don’t have a Threadripper or similar.

Practically, unless you run exotic hardware you’re unlikely to get any actual tangible benefits from tweaking most use flags on most packages. Which begs the question of why you’re using such a low-level distro in the first place…

Idk maybe I just didn’t get it, but my month of running Gentoo was mostly just annoying. Again, great learning experience, but didn’t make sense to me as a daily driver. It feels like it’s for people who want to pore over the detailed patch notes for every package on their system, which is clearly not OP.

NixOS gives me enough control over how individual packages are configured if I really want it, but in a way that stays entirely out of my way until I specifically want to fiddle. I’m not saying NixOS is any better for a new user, but as a pretty experienced one I found it more rewarding once I understood the ecosystem.

Turn off telemetry?

Idk man, Void is cool but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless they had a strong philosophical aversion to systemd, or wanted to try a musl-only system, and wanting a degree of “it just works” is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum.

What issues did you have? One of the many awesome things about NixOS is that you can write overrides for any particular package if you need an older version, or even to change some options.

Meta+arrow keys to manage windows: left or right to get a split, up to maximize.

Meta+pgup/pgdn to switch workspaces. Add shift to move the current window with you.

Those are the main ones I use all the time, but there’s a full list (some that aren’t bound by default) in the settings. I would probably remap pgup and pgdn to something closer to my fingers on a regular keyboard, but I use an ergo split 60% so I already have those keys on my home row.

Tbh GNOME feels best with a combo of mouse and keyboard, like Meta+mousewheel scrolling lets you switch workspaces very smoothly. And I think I had to map this myself, but I use right click drag + Meta to resize windows dynamically. But the above keys let me do 90% of what I want to with windows.

If you really want a fully keyboard-driven window management scheme you should probably check out a standalone window manager. I love sway personally.

NixOS is amazing, but it’s also got a crazy learning curve. Once you grok it though, it really changes the way you configure your computer.

Fedora is always my favorite big name distro, they’re constantly pushing the envelope and adopting new features that need some stability and exposure to mature.