What are the pros and cons for desktops ? EDIT : Thanks all. I’ll try Silverblue, bazzite and more.
I’m using Bluefin right now, but I was using bazzite before that. I’d say the biggest benefit is that it’s hard to break permanently. Sure, you can still mess up your home directory pretty bad, but system level stuff is nice and stable. The biggest problem is compatability and software instalation. Flatpak and toolbox/distrobox are nowhere near as good as the documentation makes them out to be. I’d suggest making sure you select a distribution with Nix pre-installed so it’s still possible to install stuff.
(Edit: There is apparently a workaround for the following issue, though I have not tried if yet.) Just be aware that some things are just plain impossible with atomic distos, and you can’t change it. Like the login screen. You can’t change that at all, whether it’s the background or the default zoom level. It’s part of the system packages and can’t be fixed.
I’ve been trying Bazzite out for a few days, and it’s really neat. Coming from a standard distro, I like the idea that I can install pretty much anything with the combo of Flatpak, AppImages, and Distrobox. I was unable to install DaVinci Resolve on the Fedora Distrobox however, and the lack of Snaps - although I much prefer Flatpaks or AppImages - kinda sucks because it would be nice to have the Snap for Flutter…
Haven’t tried it personally, but this might work: https://github.com/zelikos/davincibox
Basically, instead of creating a fedora distrobox and installing davinci resolve in there, this is a pre built image that has all the dependencies and such ready to go.
The part about changing the login screen seems to be not entirely true. There is also this tool that claims to be able to generate rpm from sddm themes that you then can layer onto your system image. Take this with a grain of salt though, as I haven’t tried either method because I honestly don’t care how my login screen looks.
Like the login screen. You can’t change that at all, whether it’s the background or the default zoom level, it’s part of the system packages and can’t be fixed.
in /etc/fstab (ublue-kinoite, ymmv):
# enable sddm write accesss and therefore good themes
/var/sddm /usr/share/sddm none rbind 0 0
Bazzite right now. I only use my PC for gaming and get limited play time, so I usually wake it up and straight into a game. Bazzite has worked extremely well for me to achieve that with virtually no maintenance so far (updates are automated).
Been using nixos for a couple months now. It’s nice and I really enjoy having all my configuration in one place and able to be version controlled. The down side being installing and configuring things take a bit more time to read how nix does it. I have it on a laptop that I’ve been playing with and removed it and put rocky for something else but I am 100% confident I can go right back to the way i had it.
So far the cons I’m seeing is installing vscode plugins are a little annoying and setting up to do python development on existing projects not very easy.
Python development shouldn’t be that hard I think. You can just drop a shell.nix that imports your pyproject.toml and then you can run nix develop and have all your dependencies installed seamlessly with poetry2nix.
I’m using neovim so I can’t really help you with vscode, sorry.
Have you tried Erasing your darlings with NixOS?
