Devuan for consistant stability and change to testing branch and you'll never have to install new releases, it will do in-place upgrades while testing branch still being consistantly stable.
I think you might like to try it. Maybe to get a taste for it try the nix package manager first. Right now I’m kind of struggling on whether or not NixOS is the one for me or Gnu Guix. Both are pretty awesome.
Agreed in part. There are reasons there are distros, but I don’t think Op is suggesting to run LFS as a daily driver. More that they want to install it to show they can. And on that front, I’d disagree. Go for it! The book is fairly self explanatory. It does call out some choices early on with respect to package management. Stop and think at that point. Make a choice, then move forward.
Then I have misunderstood this question. You are right, if you install LFS you get to better know your system and how it works. But as a daily driver, it is really a no-go.
I would recommend you give it a shot. Nix is not conventional and you will find that the ways you’re used to doing things are arch are done differently on NixOS. It’s not a matter of maturity. It’s a matter of use case. I use it on two systems, but not my main one because there are some things that I don’t want to deal with that NixOS imposes. I encourage you to give it a try and see what you like about it.
Definitely try KDE Plasma. It’s insanely light on resources for what it offers and its wayland implementation is near flawless with amazing touchscreen support.
NixOS has been around almost as long as Arch (20 vs 21 years)
you can install the Nix package manager on other distros as an intermediate step to start to give you the feel of things – ie. use Arch to manage your system packages and use Nix to manage your user & GUI packages
While I agree it’s nice to have access to nixpkgs’ packages in other OSs (I’ve never did this so take the following with a grain of salt), it is my opinion that you’re missing out on the biggest features if you don’t fully opt for the nix approach.
I wouldn’t reduce the nix tools to a package manager. It’s a set to interact with the nix language, which primarily is a language to build a system from. You have the biggest advantage when you know that your system only consists of components built from your set of instructions (of course this pulls in a lot of stuff from nixpkgs) because that brings your system closer to reproducibility. It also makes it more consistent.
I am allowed to use Ubuntu or Fedora (I would use the Fedora but they seemed to have fucked it up) at work. I use Arch for personal. This seams like a good way to learn Nix. I am probably never leaving Arch. It’s like a member of my family.
I’ve also been distro-hopping, but settled on NixOS. I find it very clean, you know exactly where your (system-level) configuration files are (…and could even manage user-level config files using home-manager). There is a stable branch, which is, well, stable. And even if it wasn’t, you can rollback the system at any point, which is trivial (just select a different generation during boot).
One of the biggest advantages for me is universal reproducible working environments. Using Nix+direnv, I can lock all tools (make, gcc, JupyterLab, Python, Julia) that I’m using in a project to specific versions (and upgrade/rollback). I can install programs/libraries in a nix shell and they will be removed on the next garbage collection. Upgrades are extremely safe: I once had a problem with RAM that corrupted a lot of my files during an upgrade. Nix can detect and repair this.
Downside is that Nix doesn’t follow FHS, so some programs need a little help, for example by Nix’ steam-run.
FHS is the filesystem hierarchy standard than Linux and most Unix/Unix-like systems use. The Wikipedia entry has a good simple explanation. The full standard can be found here. NixOS does not use this standard, as it’s not compatible with many features Nix offers.
Fedora is stable enough (never have any crash with Fedora for 5 years, as long as I remember on Thinkpad), and it’s bleeding edge, most of software that’s just published, will be available in most fedora repo less than 1 day, as I remember. If it’s not rolling release, then what is it? Or the term of rolling release is different?
Fedora has quick updates, but big changes like gcc or gnome version upgrades, default desktop layout and included software, changes to the package manager, etc. all happen on numbered version releases. They’re on Fedora 38 now. Rolling release distros don’t have numbered releases, they just make changes whenever they’re ready and the “releases” are usually more or less arbitrary snapshots. If you go to the Arch download page, you’d see that the current release is just the date the snapshot was made.
Your reason of “wish you start fresh” doesn’t sound compelling.
Arch is stable, and works great. Biggest draw for NixOS is packages. I don’t think NixOS has anything to offer in packages that I can’t get in Arch. I’ll not advocate switching to an experimental distro with who knows what other headache, just because I can run Debian or rpm packages. Not for a daily driver.
I think the biggest draw for Nix is configuration.nix and being able to centralize your system configuration. I personally find the AUR to be better in terms of software, especially from GitHub.
I agree that people shouldn’t jump blind into Nix without first getting to grips with it though a VM or something, tho.
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