Are there any distributions that offer benefits post-installation?
I am aware of Arch (and some other relevant distributions) having access to the AUR, and would like to know if other distributions can offer anything other than a quicker set-up.
Awkwardly looks at NixOS
- Complete configuration based on declarative options.
- Home Manager for declarative home directory management.
- Nix Flakes for reproducibility and templating
- devShells for programming.
- Easy deployment on multiple machines, declarative disk partitioning with disko.
- Is incredibly trivial to switch desktop environments (KDE -> GNOME takes only a few lines, or you can have both).
- Releases every 6 months for a stable release, offers an unstable channel to live like an Arch user without all the fear of breaking anything you couldn’t undo via the boot menu.
- Largest set of packages (over 80,000) that is contributed to every day.
NixOS is the most rewarding distribution to stick with, even though starting with it can be rough.
You should watch vimjoyers series on NixOS as an introduction since he goes over a lot of the essential basics that may trip newcomers up.
Fedora has RPM-Fusion as well as access to many fedora-tailored hardening scripts if that’s what you’re into. Setting up Flathub (and also adjusting things like internet permissions through KDE settings or flatseal f you’re into that) is a good way to access large amounts of official and unofficial software on any distro. You can also add parameters in your /etc/dnf/dnf.conf/ file to optimize and speed up DNF
- max_parallel_downloads=10 (lower this number if you have slower internet)
- countme=false (possibly not needed, but manually disables user counting)
- defaultyes=true (again not needed but even though I have been using Fedora much longer than Debian or Ubuntu I still like the Y/n setup over the y/N)
You can also disable specific repos in either KDE or Gnome Stores (I don’t know how to on CLI). I usually disable Fedora Flatpaks and all other 3rd party repos except for the RPM fusion repos I set up and Flathub. Saves a bit of time when using “dnf update”.
i use fedora btw, in case you couldn’t tell.
