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I can talk to the opposite side about why I am very happy going all in with NixOS. Prior to that I was running dual-boot Windows (for games) and Ubuntu (for coding). Despite all of the progress made on gaming on Linux, I was still having problems with the Nvidia drivers in Ubuntu, sway refused to work, hyprland glitched out, and I was stuck on i3 (because I am a full convert to tiling windows managers). I used home-manager with Nix to manage my dotfiles and had been quite happy with that workflow. As the story goes, Ubuntu had just released 24.04 and I pushed to upgrade. My linux partition was on btrfs. I had been bitten by the snapshots-locking-my-system problem before so I cleared out all my snapshots (and backed up my drive to local NAS). During the update Ubuntu did ANOTHER SNAPSHOT, it took up all the space on device (256GB, yeah I should have had more space) and crashed the system. At that point I was finally done with all of the shenanigans that Ubuntu pulls with apt (not updating everything unless you have their subscription, forcing some installs to go through snapd, separate driver management from apt…), and this last update crashing my system’s boot, even though I could have recovered with my backup, was the last straw. I considered my experience with Ubuntu, and MSFT’s actions to integrate Copilot into the OS, and decided to wipe the entire 1TB drive and go all in with NixOS. I was able to move my home-manager config right over, get my configs all converted to flakes, and get hyprland set up all in less than an hour. Smoothest transition in a long time. I even was able to jump to the 6.8 kernel and things just started working again. I was finally able to play steam games well on my system again. I may even have a path to get my VR to work in Linux again. Are there still problems? Sure. Hyprland is a compromise because sway still won’t cooperate with Nvidia GPUs. But, when I have made changes that get me to a non-bootable state, I can boot to a previous generation directly from GRUB, see what went wrong, fix it, and get back to a good state. Having that ability to recover from a bad boot situation without hacking into a safe mode or GRUB console or rip the drive out and put it into another system was incredibly refreshing. I am not going back anytime soon. |
This Fedora installation is 5 years old now. I have done a distro upgrade at least every year. It has worked extremely stabley and predictably all the way though, including the Fedora transition from X to Wayland.