Nixos-config Alternatives

nixos-config reviews and mentions

• AMD Publishes XDNA Linux Driver: Support for Ryzen AI on Linux
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jan 2024

  I think the main challenge with using Linux as a desktop OS is just the desktop part of it. It's not grotesquely horrible, but if I wanted someone to think that it was, I'd know exactly what things to tell them to do to experience that. (It goes something like, buy an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10xx series card and then try to run KDE Wayland on it.)

  I'm always good to braindump my thoughts so here goes.

  Hardware:

  If you want to run Linux as a primary desktop OS, please think about your hardware choices. There's a surprising amount of tradeoffs, and while the Linux desktop is generally a mess, I'd say this roughly defines people who wind up loving it versus hating it. Even in ways you could never realize, it will just impact your entire experience.

  - GPUs: If you go with AMD, you have to be aware that choosing the latest cards may not be the best choice. The software stack is rarely ever fully ready for a launch, and if you are not tracking the latest stable kernel it will take even longer to get kernel driver updates. That said, I strongly recommend AMD in general as AMD cards have been very reliable for me and have good drivers across the board once they're ready. NVIDIA has the advantage that you can pretty much get a card at launch and run it on Linux, one of the notable advantages of them staying out of mainline; on the other hand, if you want to keep up with the latest Linux kernels, you may find yourself unable to get the NVIDIA driver working sometimes, as it does not always work on mainline. Further, NVIDIA

  - NICs: Intel NICs generally work pretty good. They're not always perfect but they almost always have good mainline Linux support and reliability issues are definitely an exception case. WiFi is always a bit more persnickety, but things have gotten a lot better. The particular on-board WiFi used by my current motherboard is actually not generally recommended (A MEDIATEK MT7922), but I've been tracking mainline Linux and the only issues I've run into were unrelated. (There was an annoying issue with 6.6.5, it was fixed by 6.6.6 a few days later.)

  - Audio: Believe it or not, Linux audio has gotten very compelling lately, after decades of being probably the funniest joke about Linux. Be skeptical if you must, but Pipewire + Wireplumber is probably about as good as Linux audio has been, and has compelling pros and cons when compared even with commercial OSes. Bluetooth will probably work out of the box, and getting low latency "Pro" audio routing features without breaking your desktop audio no longer requires a bunch of specialized knowledge; nominally, it's a dropdown in your audio settings. That having been said... You may face some issues, especially with cutting-edge motherboards and laptops. *In general, Linux does not adequately support laptops that need a lot of software DSP in the driver to sound good.* In addition, some of the more advanced audio codec setups may not work correctly out of the box. This is NOT the case for the majority of desktop motherboards, but it is worth googling to see if you can find someone reporting that it works.

  Software:

  There is a lot of heated debates about what the best distro and desktop environments are. Normally, I'd recommend sticking with a stalwart like Debian, but in this changing environment I'm really not sure what I'd personally recommend. I run NixOS, which I think is a fantastic operating system for people who know they need it, but like Linux itself, I would not recommend it to anyone unless they're relatively sure it's something that solves a problem they actually have. I pretty much knew immediately I wanted it when I heard about it.

  But even when not considering NixOS, I strongly would recommend trying to find an "immutable" Linux distro that will work for you. This is because immutable Linux has proven to be a much better model for desktop usage that is far more robust and easier to reason about. A good example would be Fedora Silverblue. There was a nice looking project on here recently that may be of particular interest to developers, based on Silverblue, called Bluefin:

  https://projectbluefin.io/

  I can't necessarily personally recommend it, but the concept seems solid. Recommending a random recent project is a little risky, but it at least has the benefit that it's essentially just a spin of Silverblue that can be reverted back to plain old Silverblue safely as far as I know.

  My personal choice for a desktop environment is none. I use SwayWM with a bunch of bespoke configuration. It's... ugly[1]. But it works, and for me, it works quite well.

  But that is a horrible recommendation for someone who is trying to get into Linux by any measure. Instead, I recommend KDE. KDE has a fair amount of stability issues, but what I can say about KDE is that it's got a great balance of customization, features and polish for a desktop system, and I think that the current iteration of KDE is going to age well into the future. We'll see how that thought holds up, but I have my hopes.

  If you are using an AMD card, I can also say that running KDE/Plasma Desktop in Wayland mode is a pretty good experience, if you can. It does come with some challenges and downsides, but there are some positives, especially if you like high DPI or high refresh rate screens, or you want to use OBS to capture or stream the screen, as it will be a lot more efficient using Pipewire on Wayland. At the very least, it's not a huge commitment since you can log out and jump back in with an X11 session through your display manager if anything goes too wrong.

  [1]: https://github.com/jchv/nixos-config/tree/master/modules/pro... - In case anyone is curious about a "real world" Sway setup, this certainly is one. In the back of my mind, I'm secretly hoping someone will suggest improvements. :)