Yup. I agree. Immutable distros save me from myself and endless tweaking.
I have it on my gaming laptop and my gaming desktop. I'll be throwing it on my wife's gaming desktop soon enough.

NixOS manages to be all of these at once except the manual dependency management

Don't show this image to my girlfriend

Do people really be using Slackware these days? I'm on Bazzite atm and it's cool but a bit different esp with the ostree stuff.

Curious what the use case is for Slackware nowadays

Feeling superior to Gentoo and Arch users.

I see the main use case for Slackware, if you’re a Linux graybeard, who has used it for 20 years.

NixOS is indirect manual dependency management.

People who like fixing things.

Fiddling is how you find out what’s possible and what you like.

A few thousand people in the world, yes.

It combines the stability of Debian with the simplicity of Arch, and turns both up to 11.
Main selling point is that it never does anything unexpected.
You set it up and then it works the way you're used to, literally for decades.

I‘m sure there’s a window manager you haven’t explored yet.

Which one?

How do you like it?

And in the center of the graph you can find Fedora.
Far from perfect but the exact middle ground

Both

It makes sense if you have several computers, where you want the same setup.

I have several computers I actively use, but they all run different operating systems and different software. There’s typically a main machine, a vintage machine, and an experimental one. I like the variety.

Highly underrated distro!

You mean, spend 4-6 days tearing your hair out, before landing on a solution which evaluates to literally the same output as your current version, but is 10% cleaner and more elegant?

Of course you do, after all, that satisfies that itch. Well. For a while, anyways...

I totally understand. That’s why I have a working Mac and a sometimes working Linux machine.

Because it just works. Which is what an OS and DE need to do first and foremost.

To invert an argument, prefix it with no- or capitalize the short form, for example to turn off --sarcastic (or -s), use --no-sarcastic or -S.

Yeah, that's me comfortably sitting on Bazzite right now. There are definitely ways for it to improve, but I've only really ever had one issue in the last few months, and that was fixed the next week. I just get to use my computer, and it's nice.

Slack is great when you need to make something completely out of the ordinary. It's right there just one step removed from a system from scratch without GNU.

That said, embedded computers nowadays run full Debian. So I dunno what use it still has.

Nix

The default web interface doesn't do it and the images are not tagged in a way that you could easily fix it with CSS. You could possibly do it with a greasemonkey script (see your local LLM).

Tinkering to Mint enlightenment pipeline.

The old.lemmy.world frontend has the option to "collapse inline media" in the settings, but it isn't available on the default one.

No

Install a random distro once a week for the next 6 months.

Many people do ‘config files’ with Ansible, or at least with some kinda dotfiles hosted on their Github. This way, firstly, setting up a new machine takes maybe an hour mostly because of downloading all the packages. Secondly, no need to guess what settings one has changed somewhere years ago, since they're all written down in these files.

It's actually very convenient if one adds things to the configs gradually when the need arises.

A centralized config? Beautiful.

That can be done in regular distros with Ansible.

For my bare metal personal systems, I just use Debian stable with backports. When that does not suffice, I manually build and install things from source.

Yeah but I like to tinker when I chose to tinker. Not randomly when I'm trying to get work done

Slackware in 2026? Didn't know it was still around

nix

Roll with Debian Testing? Or even SID?

It's there to solve your "This is boring" issue without having to do all of the system configuration stuff manually*.

I was able to package a nightly AppImage as if it were installed normally like an app, and I could reinstall the system if I wanted to, and it'd still be there. NixOS is the opposite of manual dependency resolution, it's dependency heaven. You can have unstable and stable repositories side-by-side, living in a utopic egalitarian society. You can write a configuration file that does everything. You can do anything with NixOS. NixOS is the one true god, all hail NixOS---

Ah, I see why you may not want to use it. Consider it though, it's genuinely good and trying doesn't hurt.

I haven't even told you about nix-comma or nix helper (nh) yet. May the, uh, flake be with you.

*You do have to write the config files, though you can just adapt someone else's configuration.

Yes

Come to the dark side, we've got new Plasma, and exhausting manual configuration

Congratulations. You can do actual work now.

Did you also have an issue booting due to some network driver issue on 43.20260309? I had to rpm-ostree rollback to 43.20260217 a couple weeks ago. Besides that, Bazzite has indeed been very smooth sailing.

debian unstable

Installed gentoo on my desktop, never looked back

Ye, its another "software-center" now called myrlyn. I still use sudo zypper for everything and I like the sudo zypper dup for updating your machine and make sure everything on both drivers and software related is updated by the distro it self, so you don't end up with mitchmatches here and there. Also the snap funktion for rollback by default is epic.

The answer: Fedora

You're welcome.

back when i used to get burgled regularly, it was great. forced us out of the flat for a while before the insurance came in, far better than wasting time on pointless computance.