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! 😊

  • Decq@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    5 hours ago

    I’ve converted everything to NixOS (Desktop, laptop, nas and 3d printer, rpi with home assistant) only my router is still pfSense (and thus BSD). It just makes configuration and updating so much easier from one central configuration. And I don’t have to remember what and how I installed something. It’s just there in my flake.

    • morbidcactus@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      I haven’t looked at Nix in detail but you got me interested for 3d printers in particular, already have my klipper config in git if an SD card fails on me, going to have to look at doing that for the os too.

      • Decq@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        I love it for using klipper. But when I started doing it the klipper pkgs did give me some troubles. You can work around them, but know you might find some issues on the way. Maybe it’s better now, I haven’t really updated that part of my config much recently.

        Do know that not all arm devices are equally supported. rpi 3 and 4 are, the rest is community based (see: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM). Personally I run klipper on a x86_64 thin client for this reason and because raspberry pi’s were scarce and expensive back then.

    • needanke@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      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.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 hours 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.