@kasdeya

You say that like it's a bad thing

@kasdeya oh we're quite honest with ourselves about this motivation. we used linux heavily in the 90s and early 2000s, then we switched to mac os because we wanted things to work.... but around 2015 we decided we'd made things boring for ourselves and grown complacent and we wanted everything to be harder, so we switched back to linux

our coworkers at the time were nonplussed at that explanation of the choice

@kasdeya And here am I, using NixOS, because I don't like solving computer problems. If your set up is sufficiently vanilla, it really does Just Work, in a way no other Linux distro has for me.

I tried Arch and even Gentoo and they both seemed like endless fiddling to me. Before NixOS, the best I'd found for me was Debian with a very very boring GNOME setup.

@kasdeya Oh, how true is that. And I was in that picture as well for a decade before I switched to OpenBSD.

Good thing is that people keep solving problems and thus stay informed and curious. Sometimes, however, I would wish that they invent less "new" solutions for things that have been solved and working for 20 years...

@kasdeya @Nickiquote This almost sounds like encouraging ordinary Windows users to switch to Linux is a bad idea because it is filled with problems that need solving.

Are you sure you want to break ranks from the party line and risk being burned at the kernel stake?

@kasdeya infinite wellspring of problems is a great description of nixos

i wish it clearly stated that that is how it is, so i would've known to avoid it, but nooo, nixos tries to sell itself as solving problems 🙃​

@kasdeya As a non-developer, my reasons for preferring Linux (and open source generally) come down to freedom: from big companies pushing your data to their cloud, from monthly software subscriptions, from all manner of telemetry, etc.

I'm geeky enough to enjoy the occasional challenges but not so geeky that I want to engage in constant troubleshooting. So I mostly stick to Linux Mint for stability and the wide availability of support.

@kasdeya Actually, you've got it wrong.

Linux users don't like being helpless.

Which is generally the "Windows experience". It usually works so so, until it doesn't, and then you pray and do voodoo incantations, hoping it will get better.

Linux issues can mostly be solved in a systematic, deterministic approach.

@kasdeya I hate how real this is

I call it a brain bug that doesn't let me be happy with things that work ootb

When my ecosystem works 100% and I have the mental space to do stuff, I keep fiddling with little moving parts in there

Then I get frustrated that things don't work and go on sidequests to fix or sandbox things

@kasdeya

People who likes solving problems gets drawn to Linux not because there are more problems, but because they can solve them.

@kasdeya I went Ubuntu Arch Nix (With some pitstops) and I enjoy solving software problems.

But honestly the reality is that the original move was caused by Windows.

When it breaks, you can't fix it. That should make ANYBODY leery of using it. Imagine driving a car that you couldn't maintain even if you wanted to? (To be clear; You the home user CAN maintain your electric car too!)

@kasdeya For all nerds, which have solved the Arch and NixOS challenges, I can suggest SadServers.

https://sadservers.com/

@kasdeya The irony of NixOS is that its declarative config is touted as a way of making system management easier, when in reality (at least for me) it just introduces new problems and is so different from other Linux distros that a lot of what you learn from solving Linux problems is completely useless for NixOS.

My experience with NixOS after more than a decade of using Linux was actually pretty similar to your experience with Arch (it was Arch that you tried, right? I can't recall.). Confusing, frustrating, and it made me feel stupid when I couldn't figure out things that longtime NixOS users claimed would be "the easy part."