TLDR: is the amount of time used to switch to these distros worth it? (compared to Debian, Fedora, etc.), or is there a better distro that fits my use case?
I have been using Linux for about 4 years now as my daily driver, distro hopping a lot. I have used PopOS (for a few years), Manjaro, Garuda (for a year or so), KDE Neon, Debian, Linux Mint, Nobara (for some months until I ran into system breaking issues), and lastly EndeavourOS.
Issues I have run into in the past are around the different packaging systems and versioning. The Debian/Fedora based ones seem to be fairly slow to update and so they have out of date packages, which sometimes is ok, but sometimes if they are too out of date I have to compile it from scratch. Also the different packaging systems (like apt, pacman, dnf...) means that depending on what flavor I am currently running there may not be a analogous system or maybe a package will be missing and I end up (once again) having to build it from scratch. On the other side I have Arch Linux based ones, which usually works great (especially having access to the AUR) but I end up spending a lot of time configuring stuff that isn't built in (which is by design I know), or having stuff randomly be broken after an update. (which I suppose is my own fault I should have probably set up btrfs or something). Also some libraries will build/work great out of the box on some distros and be completely unusable on others for no apparent reason.
I looked into Gentoo, NixOS, and Guix SD as possible solutions for my issues. Gentoo because since it seems like I have to compile a lot of my libraries anyways maybe I should use a system where you have to compile everything. NixOS and Guix since it seems they are designed for package management and versioning built into the system which might be exactly what I am looking for.
I am worried about the learning curve of all of these. I don't have a lot of time to mess around with configuring stuff all the time. Ideally I'm looking for a distro that works well with my old-ish hardware (with NVIDIA support unfortunately) where I can sit down, program and/or play games on steam+proton; but it seems like I have to choose between "system is stable but packages are old" and "system and libraries are new but is very unstable. Or if I am using snaps or flatpak its "install 5 things and now you are out of memory" (thanks electron).
Also concerned about both NixOS and Guix since they seem to be designed behind "everything goes through the package manager", which is super cool for making it so the environment is the same, but I am concerned about getting stuff to work if a package doesn't exist or if the library is designed to use like 'pip' or 'bun.sh' or some built in package manager.
Any thoughts about this? any non popular distros that might fit my use case? did I give up on some distro too soon? am I just a confused newb?
Since there's no answer from Guix users over here, well, I use Guix as my main distro. The language choice is superior to Nix's half-Haskell DSL. However, the bigger issue with Guix is the lack of maintainers. NodeJS hasn't been updated since the last five year and Zig lacks a lot of packages. Another big issue is the centralized GNU server, which can fail at any moment. Their servers are all located in either the USA, or Europe, and for Asia, downloading NARs with such slow speed is a pain in the ass.
I went from Arch to NixOS, so I can offer a bit there.
You definitely won't want to rely on it until you know a good amount and get comfortable. Things can be made to work, but knowing how to get it done is the main thing most of the time.
Regarding package availability, it's just a matter of a few oddly esoteric incantations and version controlled code, usually. Binaries are another story but still possible, and python is a special case of that.
It has been an annoyance for me, but I've also learned a lot by getting things to work. If you use any niche python stuff you're bound to run into something. A bunch is already packaged and works fine, though. Either way there's a bit of extra nuance, which is more to learn.
You don't have to start with NixOS and can feel it out using nix on any distro. It can be hard to tell if someone will vibe with it. All that said, it could be more than you're looking to get into, but you can ease into it if you're interested.
I use nixos for dev all the time, personally I think it's great
What I would suggest however is to install the nix package manager on another distro, learn how it works that way and then switch when you're comfortable only using nix
Flakes are absolutely incredible for development and I think every project beyond scrappy scripts should use them.
You can specify all your dependencies (compiler, libraries, cli tools, environment variables etc) in your nix flake, then run nix develop and it'll make you an isolated shell with all that stuff
(For example, I don't have go, rust or dotnet installed but when I cd into one of my projects directors it installs them to a temporary shell and catches them until I clean up)
The flake also generates a lock file which specifies every version of every dependency with a git rev and a hash, meaning if you check flake and lock into git, anyone else who clones that project and uses the flake gets the exact same system you were using
I wanted to love nixos but it has many shortcomings that aren’t immediately obvious but can really stump you. No FHS compatibility seems fine but certain programs require it and don’t have nix native workarounds. Additionally, the documentation is really not good. I used it for a while but it got in the way too much; now I use a fedora variant and use regular Nix for dev packages using nix-direnv. Gives me the nix features while also having a fully compliant and functional base system
No FHS compatibility seems fine but certain programs require it and don’t have nix native workarounds.
Nix, as well as Guix, both have the option to enable FHS emulation to resolve this issue.
