Honestly what is wrong with ‘just works’. If the policies behind the project and the security and privacy is all in place using this option is nothing wrong.
For linux to grow it needs to be more ‘just works’. Let the complex stuff and simple stuff be there. It’s not one or the other.
When I was younger, tinkering around was a hobby in itself. But today I actually used my machine and I want it to work without hassle. I don’t want to think about swap partition sizes, modeset kernel parameters and that kind of stuff. I want a reliable tool.
That’s why so many devs use MacBooks. They’re essentially Unix machines with a proper GUI and mostly work absolutely flawlessly.
I’ve been using MacBooks for over ten years now and had exactly one crash: when the drive was failing so hard, it couldn’t even spin up anymore.
keyboard / shortcut based - all interactions can be done from keyboard (within common sense limits)
all keys can be custom mapped (i have muscle memory of my custom keys for certain actions, so i’d like to keep them)
all can be configured from dotfiles (worse case shell scripts and ansible)
very low ressource consumption, snappy system with no delay
I’d recommend Debian 12/testing/sid with the Sway compositor. Homebrew, Nix and Guix can all be installed on top of any GNU/Linux distribution to provide containerized packages. Flatpak can be used to obtain the latest version of graphical applications as well. Terminals like alacritty and kitty are Wayland natives and Foot is widely considered to be the most minimal “default” terminal for Wayland compositors. You can use Sway’s built in “swaybar” or status bars like Waybar and eww. Sway configuration is just like i3 where you can configure specific devices like keyboards and monitors from a single file.
I daily drive NixOS on a gaming PC and work laptop, works great for both and haven’t encountered that password issue you mentioned
ElementaryOS, mint and pop are good starter ones and elementary looks a lot like Mac’s interface
For desktop environments the ones I know well that have the top bar, GNOME has one by default but don’t think it’s very configurable, Pantheon looks a lot like the Mac UI and I think you can technically edit the html behind it? KDE is definitely the one people use for maximum customisability and you can create a top bar with that pretty easily
As for capabilities, most distros will do most things, they’re all pretty much the same under the hood and all run the same software depending on package manager
Package managers generally come with the distro and I think that’s usually the thing that makes people’s minds. I’ve not used brew but most package managers will be something like
Snap (most distros): “snap install firefox” Apt (Ubuntu based distros): “apt-get install firefox” Pacman (arch based distros): “pacman -S firefox”
Apologies if I got any details/syntax for any of this wrong am doing this off the top of my head and am rather tired
(Xfce version specifically) is very fast (within reason; it's still a modern OS)
It's already pretty keyboard-centric and it can be improved further if you like tinkering (my reason for dropping Windows was precisely lack of keyboard-centric controls, so if I stick to Mint, I guess it's good on that front)
Keys can be custom mapped, although I guess most bigger Linux systems allow that either out of the box, or through 3rd party software
Unsure what a "dotfile" is, so can't comment on that
And Mint is still slowly adding animations to its functions (to some people's dismay), and I don't feel lag when alt-tabbing around, so I guess it is snappy too
a minimal, configurable (file based for git) tiling window manager
I like i3, it ticks all your boxes. Made my own config in 2020 and it still works. Keep in mind that you have to design your whole desktop enviroment when you go the window manager route. bspwm might be an option as well
terminal based package management as easy as brew (maybe Nix?)
Every linux distro has it, I’m an Arch person, many people like Archs package manager pacman, so you could go with EndevourOS or if you’re adventorous with vsnilla Arch.
as much terminal emulator based as possible (i honestly mostly only need a browser and the terminal, most other apps have a TUI that i can use with the keyboard, see the above requirement)
Well, what kind of software you’ll run is up to you. Linux has all the TUI stuff. If you haven’t already, check out vim, emacs and nnn. Don’t forget to customize your shell (and choose it first, i would recommend zsh or fish).
**General advice:**Look into r/unixporn, most posts there have dotfiles, look for something you like an try it (with a fresh user that you can delete afterwarda maybe?)
It might have. I’ve tried nixos on a mini PC meant as a home server, so most configuration is done via SSH and users don’t change (much), I might have accidently activate it while trying nixos out.
Making users unable to login is a bit of an odd (side?) Effect, but maybe I’m not understanding the purpose of this option correctly. I’ll stay away from it for now :D
The NixOS ideal is that every detail of the system is configured through Nix expressions so that the system is completely reproducible. But in practice there are some details you might want to configure directly.
With users.mutableUsers = false you are in the “ideal” declarative mode where users and groups are supposed to be fully represented in configuration.nix including passwords (or hashed passwords). In this mode the Nix config overrides everything in /etc/passwd. If the Nix config doesn’t specify passwords I think the default is to leave the account without a password, disabling login for that account.
With users.mutableUsers = true NixOS respects changes to user and group accounts made outside of configuration.nix. Accounts configured through Nix will be added to /etc/password if they aren’t already there. But NixOS won’t remove accounts, and won’t modify or unset passwords. In this mode the default of leaving the password unset makes sense because you’re expected to set a password by running passwd. This is the typical choice because there are security problems with putting passwords in configuration.nix.
You can set passwords in the Nix config using the password, passwordFile, hashedPassword, or initialPassword options. If mutableUsers is true these options only set the password the first time the user account is created. I checked to see if there are any options that implicitly disable mutable users, but I didn’t find any.
Have a buddy that will buy 24 packs of that hot garbage for parties or get togethers. Either that or Keystone light. Not really sure why I’m friends with him…
lemmy.ml
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