My Linux Setup
My journey so far
My Linux journey took me to many distributions over the years:
Linux Mint
Guess everyone had to start somewhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. For the things I did back then, which was mostly taking notes for university classes and some simple programming, it was ok. Cinnamon was also fine at the beginning, coming from Windows.
Ubuntu
After that, I used vanilla Ubuntu for a while (back in a time when it was still kinda ok and not full of snaps). I thought the way GNOME worked with the different workspaces was cool.
Kubuntu
I soon switched to KDE Plasma in the form of Kubuntu. Which was awesome, all the things you could customize. The whole set of KDE software is also more up my alley than their GNOME equivalents.
Manjaro
While I was occasionally still dual booting windows until now, it was finally time to use Linux all the time, also on my desktop PC. I needed and wanted more up-to-date software for this, so I switched to a rolling release distro and ended up with Manjaro. The few months I used it, it was quite ok, and also supported my hardware well. That said, there were and still are some concerns with Manjaro (there a good write-up here. So I just went to use Arch proper.
Arch Linux
Despite the common opinion, I found Arch actually be easy to install, the guide in the archwiki is pretty detailed. I also soon began documenting and automating the installation process to fit my needs in case I wanted to start fresh. That said, Arch has been extremely stable for me and the legendary wiki and a community has a wealth of knowledge if one encounters problems.
In the years I used Arch, I also learned a lot of new things about the inner workings of Linux. This was also the time-period where I learned to love vim, which I use daily now. While still staying with Plasma most of the time, I also used i3 for a while (and took one or 2 looks what GNOME is up to)
While Arch really is awesome (and I would everyone interested in Linux to at least try it out for a while) there were also a few things that annoyed me. As already said, I documented my whole setup and ended up with some pretty convoluted installation scripts. That said, such scripts take also time to maintain, and testing them would usually mean spinning up a VM etc. Not to mention the not-so-nice experience of not writing down a magic command that fixes an issue.
NixOS
I eventually came to know the Nix ecosystem. After using the (community made) home-manager tool to manage my dotfiles, I took the plunge and replaced Arch with NixOS.
There are 2 things I find great about Nix: The whole system-configuration in declared in one file, and the system is set up exactly the way it is defined, with all packages and customizations. The second is the awesome nix_shell, that creates local development environments in an awesome way. Want to see how your node14 application works with node16? Just create a nix-shell without screwing up your global install or setting up something like NVM.
Fedora Silverblue
Despite my initial hype for NixOS I was not 100% satisfied with it. I switched to Fedora Silverblue. I like its combination of containers, Flatpak and the toolbox. I do most of my work a toolbx container where I have everything I need installed. Fedora just works™
Return to Nix
While (almost) everything worked with Fedora, I still kept all my dotfiles, organized using Nix, or more specifically home-manager. Due to this, I could never really let go of Nix and kept installing it. Eventually, I decided to not due some weird half-supported setup, but just to go back and use NixOS again.