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Do you stick to the same linux distro across your devices? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Hej lemmings! (Hoping this is relevant enough for the selfhosted commjnity)

Quick question for you all: do you stick with the same distro across your PC, laptop, and server, or do you pick different ones based on the device and what you're doing?

For me, I've been mixing and matching depending on the use case, but I'm starting to think it'd be nice to just have one distro (or at least one family like Fedora or Debian) running everywhere. That way I wouldn't get confused about default settings or constantly have to look up flags for different package managers.

Right now my setup is:

Gaming rig: CachyOS
Laptop: AuroraOS
NAS: Unraid
Various project servers: DietPi, Debian, Alpine etc..

I feel like NixOS might be the only distro that could realistically handle all these use cases, but I'm a bit scared of the learning curve and the maintenance work it'd take to migrate everything over.

Am I the only one who feels like having "one distro to rule them all" would be nice? How do you guys handle your setups? All ears! 😊

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[–] needanke@feddit.org 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

How quick could you pick it up? And how does it handle one config for different devices (due to different hardware(fstab/cryptsetup differences), propietary/non-mainlined drivers?

I have been thinking about switching because I'd love a reproduciable system but fear it would take some of that flexibility I rely on (I've had some issues with ftstab/cryptsetup and initramfs customizations on the fedora atomic base of bazzite on my steamdeck).

[–] Decq@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I have to be honest and say it was a journey. Nix in itself isn't really difficult I find. But everything together and finding the right documentation and figure out how NixOS comes together can be a bit daunting.

But a simple straight forward config is pretty doable. My advice is to start small and build up. You can reuse your old dotfiles and include them in the configuration directly, so you don't have to convert everything to nix (right away). Also don't scare away from using flakes, they are the way to go in my opinion.

You can define multiple hosts/systems in one configuration with each their own nixosSystem call. So you can define hardware/fs/network etc per system.

Also I like to add that the vimjoyer video's on nix helped me with understanding some of the concepts, They are usually short and straight to the point.

[–] OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

Best advice is can give you is to #DOCUMENT everything you do for what reason and how it works inside your config file. So you know what each code block does and how it executes making your entire config dummy proof also helps learn the syntax super fast!