NixOS is probably the best Linux distro right now; its immutable, but it doesn’t take power away from the user. It uses the latest packages without breaking on every update. You could write a simple config for a machine and just… leave it be, and it won’t break (excluding hardware failure).

Before

I had my whole homelab and all my devices running NixOS; everything was from a single repo. I had auto updates, zero faulty updates, zero maintenance. I had a unified configuration across all devices.

Why I Switched Away

So, why did I switch away? Well… it was boring… very, very boring. I could just use devices with zero tinkering; everything just-worked. I always had fun troubleshooting and debugging stuff; that’s why I used to run Arch testing (even on my servers). I missed the thrill of the unknown, the excitement of not knowing if an update would break something. I missed the sense of accomplishment when I fixed a tricky issue. I missed the learning experience that came with troubleshooting and debugging. I felt like I was getting too comfortable, too complacent, and I needed a change.

What Now?

So… what did I switch to?

Desktops

For my desktops, I’ve been using Arch stable; I’d forgotten how to install non-NixOS distros. For NixOS, it was always just mount the drives, then nixos-install; it was really easy. I’ve been running almost the same config as before, and the first issue I had was audio (as always with Linux), or more specifically, Pipewire (still a lot better than ALSA… God, that was bad). I fixed that pretty quickly (I love the Arch forums). I’ve been having some trouble keeping configs synced between machines, but I’m going to figure that out.

Servers

For my servers (except my Renegade, which runs Armbian), I was really on the fence between Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora Server. Ubuntu spies on users; Fedora was a bit… not to my taste, so Debian it is. As before, I had to figure out how to install it, and I couldn’t over SSH (which would be really handy to autostart on the default ISO). I had to plug a monitor and keyboard into my server and install it; setting it up was pretty smooth. I set up OpenSSH, decided to go with CasaOS this time (I was doing it manually last time, decided to go with a more… complete solution). It was really easy; just clicked yes a couple of times, and boom, it works. My only issue was Jellyfin hardware acceleration; they should really forward /dev/dri128 by default; it would be helpful.