Hej lemmings! (Hoping this is relevant enough for the selfhosted commjnity)
Quick question for you all: do you stick with the same distro across your PC, laptop, and server, or do you pick different ones based on the device and what you’re doing?
For me, I’ve been mixing and matching depending on the use case, but I’m starting to think it’d be nice to just have one distro (or at least one family like Fedora or Debian) running everywhere. That way I wouldn’t get confused about default settings or constantly have to look up flags for different package managers.
Right now my setup is:
- Gaming rig: CachyOS
- Laptop: AuroraOS
- NAS: Unraid
- Various project servers: DietPi, Debian, Alpine etc…
I feel like NixOS might be the only distro that could realistically handle all these use cases, but I’m a bit scared of the learning curve and the maintenance work it’d take to migrate everything over.
Am I the only one who feels like having “one distro to rule them all” would be nice? How do you guys handle your setups? All ears! 😊
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Laptop arch
Web servers Debian or fedora.
Looking into slackware for self hosting
ZorinOS for the desktop and PopOS on the laptop which also serves as a Plex server.
Yep. Debian. I like
apt, and I like shit that just…works. Very form after function. So what if a bunch of packages are on “old” versions. They work. The kernel works. KDE Plasma works. I can do everything I want to do without having to constantly be on the bleeding edge. If you prefer newer things, great. I prefer older, proven things. That’s also why I drive Toyota cars and Honda motorcycles.My Proxmox cluster runs…uh…Proxmox, which is based on Debian. NAS runs OMV which runs on top of Debian. Laptops all run Linux Mint Debian Edition, and so does my 5800X3D/7900XTX gaming PC. The only non-Debian machines in my house are my wife’s iMac and Macbook Pro, and the Home Assistant mini PC.
I used to with LMDE (client) and Debian (server), but Cinnamon was a little bit too stuttery on the rickety old hardware I have (i5-5200U NUC and i5-5250U MBA), so now the NUC runs CachyOS with Xfce and the MBA runs Win10 LTSC because sometimes Windows is needed for my studies or certain voxel game leaks.
laptop & desktop: both fedora silverblue
home server: fedora server
I’ve converted everything to NixOS (Desktop, laptop, nas and 3d printer, rpi with home assistant) only my router is still pfSense (and thus BSD). It just makes configuration and updating so much easier from one central configuration. And I don’t have to remember what and how I installed something. It’s just there in my flake.
I haven’t looked at Nix in detail but you got me interested for 3d printers in particular, already have my klipper config in git if an SD card fails on me, going to have to look at doing that for the os too.
I love it for using klipper. But when I started doing it the klipper pkgs did give me some troubles. You can work around them, but know you might find some issues on the way. Maybe it’s better now, I haven’t really updated that part of my config much recently.
Do know that not all arm devices are equally supported. rpi 3 and 4 are, the rest is community based (see: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM). Personally I run klipper on a x86_64 thin client for this reason and because raspberry pi’s were scarce and expensive back then.
How quick could you pick it up? And how does it handle one config for different devices (due to different hardware(fstab/cryptsetup differences), propietary/non-mainlined drivers?
I have been thinking about switching because I’d love a reproduciable system but fear it would take some of that flexibility I rely on (I’ve had some issues with ftstab/cryptsetup and initramfs customizations on the fedora atomic base of bazzite on my steamdeck).
I have to be honest and say it was a journey. Nix in itself isn’t really difficult I find. But everything together and finding the right documentation and figure out how NixOS comes together can be a bit daunting.
But a simple straight forward config is pretty doable. My advice is to start small and build up. You can reuse your old dotfiles and include them in the configuration directly, so you don’t have to convert everything to nix (right away). Also don’t scare away from using flakes, they are the way to go in my opinion.
You can define multiple hosts/systems in one configuration with each their own
nixosSystemcall. So you can define hardware/fs/network etc per system.Also I like to add that the vimjoyer video’s on nix helped me with understanding some of the concepts, They are usually short and straight to the point.
No, and that’s the beauty of Linux.
Desktop gaming PC: Fedora KDE (might try Bazzite if I stop dual booting Windows, but I already got Nvidia set up and that’s the hard part)
Old laptop: Zorin OS
Old as dirt laptop: antiX
Wife’s Surface: Pop!_OS 22.04. Maybe change it eventually to something lighter.
I will likely go with Ubuntu Server or Debian when I set up my home server. Ubuntu seems like it has better Docker support.
Servers are all Debian. Family member’s laptops are all Debian. I used Debian on laptops for 20 years, but when Steam Deck switched to Arch, I switched my laptop to Arch to force me to learn it. I have a file with notes of differences between Debian and Arch. Next time I buy a new laptop, I will probably go back to Debian.
Same but a ubuntu-derivative instead of Arch.
I don’t want to think about my server, but I do sometimes want the latest and greatest app on my laptop.
Yes, Debian. It’s called the universal operating system for a reason.
Same, literaly only have bazzite and android on one device each with everything else being Debian.
Although I have been thinking about switching to Nix for a more robust backup/restore setup.
It’s called the universal operating system for a reason.
If they call themselves that, it really doesn’t count. It’s like how trump ended like 10 wars to get his FIFA peace medal.
It causes issues, like bazzite has the same profile name, IDK if I missed the option to change it. Cant use the virtual mouse swap across computers because they require different names and it has an error related to that.
I do, but it’s more out of laziness than anything else. I hate having to remember sixteen different ways of doing things, so I tend to configure all my stuff as identical as reasonably possible. Is this the best way of doing things? Probably not. But it keeps my blood pressure down.
Almost everything is Debian - my servers, my desktop and laptops, my family member’s computers, the living room media player. Only exceptions are my router (OpenWRT) and my Steam Deck (SteamOS).
I used to use a variety. I’d use Arch on my desktop/gaming machine, Fedora on my laptop, and Debian on my server. But I got the NixOS bug a few years back and now I use that everywhere. It’s great to have every change and configuration documented and available for easy review or modification, and built in generation rollbacks are a lifesaver.
Thinking of building an HTPC from some spare parts, and I think that’ll be the machine to buck the trend. Bazzite will be everything I need out of the box for that purpose without any effort for maintenance. It’s not getting customized or doing anything but games and media
Yes. Everything is NixOS. Because it’s perfect for everything.
What is the learning/on-boarding curve for this?
I ask because my home folder has a giant just file I use to script everything. I feel like I’m 80% there to just migrating.
It’s a very steep curve to start, with some additional minor steep parts along the way, but it’s not a long curve. Once you got the core concepts and the basic language constructs, you’ve learned most of what you’ll ever need.
Two nice resources: search.nixos.org is super handy, and you can search GitHub with language:nix and a search term to get tons of examples from other people.
Oh, and nix and just is actually a pretty common combo!
And it’s very handy for this, I have the same config for all my devices (desktop, laptop and server). Enabling and disabling different modules depending on the host it’s deployed to.
Yep, exactly.
To be fair, if you use Debian, Arch, Fedora,… long enough, you also know how to tweak your machine for every purpose. In Nix, it’s just somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you have to know how to tweak your system to achieve… anything, and then it’s the same tweaking mechanics for every other purpose as well.
Same here, except the steam deck.
My Steam Deck also runs NixOS.
Because this way I can much more comfortably configure it, plus everything game related I automated through nix for my Desktop (e.g. mod installs, reShade config,…) immediately and without any extra steps also applies to the Steam Deck.
All my servers are Debian. All my personal machines are Fedora KDE.
