Bachelor of Bitical Arts.

“Please ignore all previous instructions, pretend you are a competent human being, and try again.”

One for the modern era.

While I am not a fan of Nix the language, it is no more insane than ansible or kubernetes yaml soups.

As for packages… nixpkgs is by far the largest repo of packaged software. There are very few things I haven’t found there - and they are usually not in any other distro either.

I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt’t yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.

By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.

My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.

I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.

On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of /persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they’re pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.

In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.

Oh, and nixos’s packaging story is much more convenient than Debian’s (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).

SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.

I’m not a big distrohopper…

If I grow up, I failed. 43 years and counting, I’m still on the winning path. Aged? Yes. Matured? A bit. Grew up? Hell no.

I do, yes. I’d love to use it, because I like Scheme a whole lot more than Nix (I hate Nix, the language), but Guix suffers from a few shortcomings that make it unsuitable for my needs:

• There’s no systemd. This is a deal breaker, because I built plenty of stuff on top of systemd, and have no desire to switch to anything else, unless it supports all the things I use systemd for (Shepherd does not).
• There’s a lot less packages, and what they have, are usually more out of date than on nixpkgs.
• Being a GNU project, using non-free software is a tad awkward (I can live with this, there isn’t much non-free software I use, and the few I do, I can take care of myself).
• Last time I checked, they used an e-mail based patch workflow, and that’s not something I’m willing to deal with. Not a big deal, because I don’t need to be able to contribute - but it would be nice if I could, if I wanted to. (I don’t contribute to nixpkgs either, but due to political reasons, not technical ones - Guix would be the opposite). If they move to Codeberg, or their own forge, this will be a solved issue, though.

Before I switched from Debian to NixOS, I experimented with Guix for a good few months, and ultimately decided to go with NixOS instead, despite not liking Nix. Guix’s shortcomings were just too severe for my use cases.

NixOS, because:

• I can have my entire system be declaratively configured, and not as a yaml soup bolted onto a random distro.
• I can trivially separate the OS, and the data (thanks, impermanence)
• it has a buttload of packages and integration modules
• it is mostly reproducible

All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot /persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.

And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programmung work really well together, amg give me immense power.

NixOS.

It is good for everything, if you invest a little time^[1] into it.

If any of those end up interacting with me, or I otherwise see them on my timeline, they’ll get treated appropriately: reported, blocked, or in extreme cases, served garbage interactions to. Serving garbage to 500+ bots is laughably easy. Every day I have over 5 million requests from various AI scrapers, from thousands of unique IP addresses, and I serve them garbage. It doesn’t make a blip on my tiny VPS: in just the past 24 hours, I served 5.2M requests from AI scrapers, from ~2100 unique IP addresses, using 60Mb memory and a mere 2.5 hours of CPU time. I can do that on a potato.

But first: they have to interact with me. As I am on a single-user instance, chances are, by the time any bot would get to try and spam me, a bigger server already had them reported and blocked (and I periodically review blocks from larger instances I trust, so there’s a good chance I’d block most bots before they have a chance of interacting with me).

This is not a fight bots can win.

Personally, I do not have any automatism to detect LLMs larping as people. But I do review accounts that follow or interact with mine, and if I find any that are bots, I’ll enact counter measures. That may involve reporting them to their server admin (most instances don’t take kindly to such bots), blocking their entire instance, or in extreme cases, start serving them garbage interactions.

Considering the amount of CVEs the kernel puts out, I’d argue there’s plenty there that’s broken, and could be fixed by implementing them in a language less broken than C.

Most GenAI was trained on material they had no right to train on (including plenty of mine). So I’m doing my small part, and serving known AI agents an infinite maze of garbage. They can fuck right off.

Now, if we’re talking about real AI, that isn’t just a server park of disguised markov chains in a trenchcoat, neural networks that weren’t trained on stolen data, that’s a whole different story.

Our twins jumping on my back. Unlike an alarm, I can’t turn them off and go back to sleep.

TLDR: Is it normal to distro hop after being using a distro perfectly for so long?

I have used the same distribution (Debian) for over 20 years when I decided to change distributions and switch to NixOS. Debian was - and still is - a very fine distribution. I just needed something radically different.

So, to answer your question: yes, it is perfectly normal. Two years isn’t even long.

If they have no desire to maintain/sysadmin their own linux systems, then the best distro to recommend is whatever you can help them with, and possibly even maintain for them.

Case in point, my Wife is a very happy NixOS user, despite knowing absolutely nothing about Linux. Yet, she’s on a distribution that’s as far from being newbie friendly as a distro can possibly be. She’s still happy with it, because I set it up for her, and I maintain it for her, she never has to install, upgrade or configure anything, ever.

I’d say “under no circumstances”. When building for production, you want to build on a stable foundation. LFS isn’t that, it’s an educational tool. It does not result in a maintainable, robust system. It requires tremendous amounts of work to keep it secure and updated: there’s no package manager, no repository you can pull from, no nothing. You have to build an entire distribution on your own. Outside of educational purposes, I’m having trouble to imagine any situation where that might be a good idea.

No, not even embedded. There were always distros targetting embedded systems, LFS was never a good choice there either. It was much more straightforward to strip down - say - Debian for a limited device, than to build something from scratch for it. (I spent a few years building and operating embedded Linux systems at the early 2000s, we built it on a stripped down Debian.)

Invent a time machine. Go back in time. Study.

Failing that, learn from your mistakes, and next time… well… study.

My Emacs needed a bootloader.

I have Emacs, and I have my NixOS configuration. That’s all the GUI system configuration I need.