this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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For me, I always keep coming back to Arch tbh
Sometimes I get fed up with managing a whole system and once in a blue moon bricking my system on an update, but the alternatives are always worse, and with btrfs now, I don't have to worry about the latter problem.
Nix was the closest to pulling me away. A centralized config? Beautiful. Static package store without dependency conflicts? Beautiful. Immutable applications? The WORST idea we've ever had as a community. For instance, imo, VS Code extensions are fundamentally incompatible with Nix. I spent weeks trying to get it to work doing multiple different things to try and hope it would work. It can't. VS Code just has to be mutable.
Anyway so I'm back to arch and have been for over a year since I tried Nix (and before that Fedora which has its own issues). Before that I had been on Arch for 4 years.
I think I'll stay now. It's really the best option out there. In my mind, Arch is Linux, i.e. it's how an OS should be built for the Linux kernel and the FOSS ecosystem, and it won't ever be beat
That can be done in regular distros with Ansible.
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop I tried arch and never looked back. In hindsight, backports are insanity and just always using upstream is obviously the way to go. As a bonus, I can actually understand how arch is constructed when I need to because the wiki is amazing
But have you tried Gentoo?
I think Nix is better used for things like servers instead of a daily driver PC. Having to fuck with config files for my laptop/desktop would be a nightmare that I refuse to go through. I've been playing with Nix on a home server and I'm loving it for that. With a limited scope on what actually needs to be installed it makes managing the configs possible.
Many people do ‘config files’ with Ansible, or at least with some kinda dotfiles hosted on their Github. This way, firstly, setting up a new machine takes maybe an hour mostly because of downloading all the packages. Secondly, no need to guess what settings one has changed somewhere years ago, since they're all written down in these files.
It's actually very convenient if one adds things to the configs gradually when the need arises.
It makes sense if you have several computers, where you want the same setup.
I have several computers I actively use, but they all run different operating systems and different software. There’s typically a main machine, a vintage machine, and an experimental one. I like the variety.
The main thing that keeps me from going back to it is how much I hate manually setting up an encrypted logical volume over multiple disks with BTRFS snapshotting.