I feel like 300GBP might be a bit high. I got myself a Surface 3 in 2015 for about 500USD. It hat an Intel Atom with 2GB RAM and 64GB ssd. I used it for just under six years. I ended up using it with Windows 10 and OneNote mostly and it was pretty good.
Depends on what you’re doing at University. I was using Arch but an update caused CUDA to stop working so I couldn’t work on an assignment. Why did it stop working? They updated CUDA to 12.3 days before updating the NVIDIA driver to a version which supported CUDA. The maintainers are mostly negligent and the community is rather toxic so I’d avoid Arch for that kind of thing. NixOS looks interesting and has lots of benefits however, for a dedicated University computer I would recommend using the most boring Linux distro available like Fedora or Ubuntu.
Do you have an earlier snapshot that you can roll back to? If not then this is a learning experience about how you should take a snapshot before doing any configuration changes/updates. And also maybe some automatic ones on a schedule (daily/weekly).
As far as recovering files, you could try the Windows recovery environment (or whatever they call it). Take a snapshot first, in case it makes things worse.
If you already using EndeavourOS, you are already using Arch. So it is a very odd question. You could remove the maybe 12 EndeavourOS packages and comment out the EndeavourOS repositories if you want to go truly vanilla Arch. Out of the 80,000 packages Arch makes available to you, about two-dozen are EndeavourOS specific. Once installed, they are effectively the same OS.
So, you are just asking if it worth it for an Arch user to move to NixOS.
From what I can tell, the killer feature of NixOS is rolling out a config to multiple machines. Is that worth a switch to you?
The other big attraction of both Arch and Nix is the huge package library but if you do not use the AUR today, that does not matter to you either.
The killer feature is declarative system management. Reproducible systems is just one of the resulting properties. You want to just try out KDE for a week coming from gnome? Good luck getting rid of all the bloat when switching back on arch. You want to run a program once but not necessarily have it installed on your system? You can do that with nixos. You messed something up and your system now doesn’t boot? You can go back to a previous iteration with nixos, no need to find your liveUSB to start messing with chrooting and stuff. Ever find yourself asking where the configuration file for is so you can edit it? The answer is /etc/configuration.nix Ever had to merge older configs with newer ones because the software updated? (If no, you haven’t been using arch for long) why would you need to do that? You declaratively specified how you want your system to behave and nixos will figure out how to translate that to the new config.
And that’s just the “killer” features I use on a day to day basis
Arch based distros are easy AF. I’ve been on Linux for 2 years, I’ve tried 10+ distros, and Arch has been the easiest for me, and stable as it gets, while allowing me to get the latest drivers needed for gaming.
I’ve been using Crystal Linux, but got tired of it’s CLI only package helper, and since then I’ve moved to Manjaro KDE.
Whatever you chose, make sure you get automatic BTRFS snapshots, so you can roll back at boot whenever you wreck it.
I’ve read here on Lemmy that NixOS is a great concept but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, stating that it’s overly complicated and documentation is lacking.
If you only care about stability then you should go with Debian. If instead you want something that limits you so that you can’t easily wreck it, you could use an immutable distro like Vanilla OS, Fedora Silverblue, BlendOS or Ubuntu Core Desktop.
Actually I was able to change root into the installation now, but when I run grub2-install, I get EFI var errors, I kinda feel like giving up at this point haha.
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