Unless you are looking to work on shared systems/servers as sysadmin or other jobs, explore shells like zsh or fish and customise them rather than stick to bash. A lot more user friendly and accessible advanced features. Helps with learning a lot. Zsh is compatible with bash but fish isn’t. So choose based on what your goal with learning shell is.
If you are sticking with debian based distros, try apt and synaptic(GUI) to install your software. At some point you might also need to install tar archives. Don’t get worried as most guides should be easy to follow.
I personally have a tiny fat32 EFI partition, a small ext4 root, and everything else allocated to LVM2. Then LVs for every large path, like /home, /var, etc. I leave most of the extents unallocated until I need more space.
I think the two “major tips” that I can give you are simply
1- Package manager is your best friend.
2- Figure out the “know-hows” of Linux (i.e who “is responsible” for the video card, who deals with the cpu, how do i configure my sound card, how do i configure my video card, etc.).
Master those two tips and you can call yourself an average linux user.
Both are good (and Bash too). Try them all and choose the best one depending on the context. For example, on my main PC I use fish with a few plugins (and fisher as the manager), but I’d never use it on a server due to it not being POSIX compliant.
(Starting off with something like mint or pop!os is probably your best bet, EndeavourOS is a good choice too but it’s a little bit more effort for a first distro)
Don’t know how much “minor customization” is to you, but perhaps try adding some major stuff before giving up on it. Personally I started with prezto, customised it, and added a few things like fzf. Fish is probably nice too but I haven’t got around to giving it a fair try.
Nix has “flakes”, which allow you to share Nix code in a Git repository, it’s like repos on steroids. There are many Git projects that offer new packages (such as nix-gaming) or NixOS modules (such as my project nixos-router), or even just Nix code (such as my projects notlua and notnft, which allow you to write Lua code and nftables rules in Nix), or any combination thereof.
Would it be possible [for proprietary software to be compiled for NixOS]?
Kind of. You first have to understand what Nix derivations are - builders that take certain inputs (such as certain versions of libraries) and produce some outputs.
What happens if the inputs (such as a library version) change? The outputs change as well - previously it was /nix/store/abcdefgh-libfoo/lib/libfoo.so, now it’s /nix/store/ijklmnop-libfoo/lib/libfoo.so - the path to libfoo changes, and the binary’s RPATH reflects that.
So if you want to package binary software for NixOS, you either have to pin library versions (so the paths don’t ever change), or patch the binary.
…proprietary codecs…
It depends on what those codecs are.
Let’s say they are a binary. In that case, you install them and they get added to your PATH - easy.
Let’s say they are some data files. In that case you install it and it gets put into XDG_DATA_DIRS - easy.
Let’s say it’s a shared library (.so). First question - how is that .so loaded? By which program? From where?
Depending on the answer, what you have to do changes as well. You may have to override some core media library, or ffmpeg, or maybe you can override VLC, or VLC’s ffmpeg, but not system ffmpeg. Or, it may be the case that a simple LD_LIBRARY_PATH change will do it for you.
Basically - it depends. That’s why NixOS requires a deeper knowledge of Linux, or forces you to learn.
Outside the few games like valorant and destiny 2, literally everything else I’ve tried runs just fine on Linux. Wine/Proton has gotten really good these past 2 years. Even on Wayland, which has historically been bad for gaming things just work nowadays.
Had the exact issue after whatever pipewire update, fixed it by switching to pulseaudio. Was really trying to find different solution, one thing works temporarily(and I mean it, sometimes it fixed the issue for 1 minute sometimes for the entire session) is to switch audio profile to pro mode(if on kde at least)
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