For the past five years I have been using Arch Linux as my daily driver. From the times I have been studying my Bachelor degree at Masaryk University, to my job as a software developer.
The reasons why I love Arch Linux are quite simple:
- It’s a rolling release distribution that gets updated regularly
- It has a really good package manager
- It has the largest user repository of packages (AUR)
- It has a really good and in-depth documentation and forums
Basically for me all it comes down to when picking the distro is the amount of updates it gets and the package manager. Deciding if I want to do apt-get install <package>, pacman -S <package> or yay -S <package> was all I cared about.
In the end its all just linux, where I could have the same display manager, the same window manager, the same apps, etc.
So why did I switch?
As with all decisions, there were many reasons, but I can think of two main ones: learn something new and have a stable setup. You see, I have a Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i 16IMH9 laptop, which has some issues on linux. The fixes are beautifully written in Running Linux on the Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i Gen 9 (16IMH9).
On my arch linux I used the scripts in the repo, but there were times when the audio kept turning off. Or I installed some package and forgot to remove it (or it’s dependencies).
The initial setup of arch linux - picking the right audio package was (and still is) really confusing. Picking between pipewire, pulseaudio, alsa, jack, etc. They all work together, sometimes clash, you try to choose one, then switch to the other. I felt like I did do a good job, but not the best job.
Other than that I really loved my setup. So a few days ago I chose to put all the files on a usb drive and start anew. Installing a fresh NixOS installation on my laptop.
First thoughts of NixOS
I used the graphical installer to smooth out the installation process (especially creating the partitions). I got quickly into the setup of using Nix flakes, the language, version control with git, etc. It is certainly different, but knowing how to code and semi-understanding the structure made the usage easy.
I have successfully managed to install my dotfiles, hyprland and other programs. The hardest challenge was solving my Lenovo Yoga sound issues, which I could solve by copying alyraffauf’s NixOS config of my laptop, which can be found here.
I am certainly looking forward to using NixOS more and learning what wonders I can achieve.