Imagine for me if you will:
You awake in a sweaty mess, right after experiencing that horrid falling feeling while leaving R.E.M. sleep.
Looking around, you see where you have lived for the past several years, “Why have I never redecorated since I got here?” You ask to yourself.
Of course the answer is usually pretty obvious; money, time, or fear.
When I last shuffled my computing experience, I was installing Fedora Silverblue. I thought I was living in the future! In a world where I can be promised that the system I’m running on won’t be tainted by my silly and occasionally ill-thought out transgressions, I’m going to take that promise. Especially when it’s with Fedora, the current half-replacement of Ubuntu in the “cool distro” enigma.
After a whole year of no problems of changes to my workflow, I started to feel a little off, like a traumatizing experience tainting all future events you deem similar.
Anyways, after accepting my fate, I went straight to the NixOS homepage to download the new ISO. I had used NixOS in a VM prior, but was a little uninterested, becuase it was before the release of a graphical live environment. After a quick and absurdly simple install, I was immediately sold on the concept. I mean, come on, I don’t have to install or configure any dotfiles, /etc files, or anything other than an all-encompassing main config I was gifted.
Going through the process of living with Nix, it was fun to be learning something new again! Starting with just the main config to managing your generations, to setting up a home manager config… I never tried flakes – the concept to this day still escapes my understanding.
So after another year or two now with Nix on my system, I promptly moved over to Archlinux again, the one most default to for personal workstations. Why? I got tired. I was working constantly for days on ened trying to get Sway to run smoothly on my computer, but no matter what I could think to do, there was always an extremely uncomfortable pause beween every command or change made.
I put no blame on the developers or the wiki on this matter. I mostly blame myself for not sticking with it, and mayber further reaching out. For my money, I tried everything I could to correct my configs and home directories to ensure expedience.
Either way, I was glad to come back to Arch, it has been so long since I used anything that wasn’t a “reproducible” system. Installation and Setup are still super simple and fun to do! I’m excited to see how long this lasts before I decide to go back to NixOS… I give it a month.