I really wanted to like it. I’ve used ansible and puppet for work and there, declarative configuration made sense because I need to duplicate the same thing 1000’s of times.
For desktop, it was incredibly annoying to me to have to change my config file every time I wanted to install a new application. I still found myself messing with drivers which I hate on any OS.
My distro choices after Nix were meant to reduce the need to mess with drivers. Zorin and Mint have first-run installers for whatever card it detects (Nvidia for me at the time) which worked well enough.
By that point I had read about immutable distros but wasn’t sure about them just yet. Since I was on a hopping spree I decided I’d try it out.
When the Bazzite install went well and 99% of the applications I wanted to install were flatpaks anyway, it was a perfect fit. I’ve been running docker containers on my Ubuntu server for years so BoxBuddy was a natural fit for things that aren’t flatpaks (minecraft runs great in one). What’s more, KDE has a lot of keyboard combinations the same as Windows by default which made the switch even better for me. One that I had been fighting to add to gnome, which is admittedly small but annoying, the ability to use Meta+period to bring up an emoji selector, was built right into KDE by default?! I couldn’t believe it.
Then, I started looking for an equivalent to FancyZones found in Windows PowerToys and… What do you know, that’s also built into KDE by default?
Then a friend of mine gave me an AMD graphics card he was getting rid of which was an upgrade to my GTX 1060 I’ve been using since 2018. Since I had already moved to Bazzite, it was a simple re-base to move to the AMD version and it went off without a hitch.
It’s all over, Bazzite and KDE are home for me now.