Whelp, here I am. Been an Arch user for over 10 years now, and to this date I love it. But something is bothering me lately. Almost two years ago I jumped ship and completely switched to Wayland (using Plasma first, then Sway). I tasted modernism with all its features and it was sweet. But those last two years were a timeframe where I had to troubleshoot quite a lot compared to before where I used XFCE which was a very stable and reliant experience.

I am at a stage in my life where I do not have the time, nor the energy anymore to troubleshoot problems on a regular basis. I am now almost afraid of installing updates, because something new could fail again. But I cannot go back anymore. Wayland is too sweet.

So although I still love Arch, maybe it is time for me to look for something else which gives me more ease-of-mind. I am specifically looking at immutable distros now since the concept seems to be exactly what I am looking for (stable, low maintenance, up-to-date packages, easy rollback). But I am a bit lost with the options and hope that you can help me with some recommendations.

  • I mainly browse the web, watch movies, game, do some scripting and run qemu VMs
  • I am comfortable with the terminal
  • I don’t do fancy customizations
  • I don’t like GNOME

Distributions that I find interesting so far:

  • Aurora
  • Bazzite
  • NixOS

I am still trying to wrap my head around what the differences between NixOS and the other two are. Afaik, with Nix you can configure your system once (including what packages you want to use), save this configuration in a file, and load it up whenever I need to set it up again. And it seems to have the same concept of updates, such that you can easily roll back if needed. But it seems to be aimed more at professional users and that I might overshoot at what I was aiming for. So for someone who likes to setup a system once and then just wants to use it indefinitely without too much maintenance what would your recommendation/advice/critisism regarding my situation be?

Edit: thank you guys so much for all your recommendations and thoughts! After some further analysis I decided to install Bazzite for the following reasons:

  • shares a lot of similarities with other Atomic distros
  • but has all the nice gaming related things pre-installed and configured and it uses a properly pre-installed Steam (not the Flatpak version) (the main reason why I chose it over Aurora, which would have been my next best pick)
  • my qemu virtual machines run perfectly fine (also the shared folder)
  • some dev stuff already pre-installed (don’t think I need more than there already is)
  • fast and the OS feels like made out of one block, very consistent
  • I was ready to use my machine like I want to in basically no time
  • I already love the atomic way of handling updates
  • so far no issues

The only thing left for me to do is to figure out how to properly install SyncThing and Zerotier-One, then I am absolutely set.

  • phantomwise@lemmy.ml
    5·
    2 days ago

    NixOS is not guaranteed not to break, but if it does breaks, you can roll back to a previous working version of your system, which is pretty cool. The question is: for you, is that worth the hassle of learning the Nix language to configure your system?

    Maybe atomic distros like Fedora Silverblue and I forget the others ones could do what you want more easily?

    Otherwise I’d say debian, if you want stable you’ll definitely get stable.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Since OP mentioned that they used Plasma in the past and don’t like GNOME, it might be worth mentioning that KDE is developing their own OS which should be immutable.

      Might have to wait for a little bit though.

    • dingleberrylover@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      2 days ago

      I think I will opt for one of the atomic distros like Bazzite or Aurora, since yes, it seems very interesting and a nice project, but learning Nix just to get eventually a working system running again won’t be the right thing for me. But I will definitely load it into a VM and try it out when I have more time at hands!

      • LemmyBe@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        Take a look at blue-build.org. You create a recipe (not very difficult), that can be set to use a Fedora atomic distro like Aurora, Bazzite or Kinoite as a base, then add your own apps to the image it creates so they’re all installed along with the OS. It’s really solid and also supports rollbacks.