I’m keeping a close eye on the various immutable distros. I’ve tried NixOS a couple of times now, but I ran into issues with software compatibility. My development tools would constantly have issues, which if I put in a ton of work I could generally workaround… Then there was some software that I just couldn’t run, and you can’t just run a standard “Linux” binary because all of the libraries that most binaries would expect, such as libc, libssl, etc are not in /usr/lib, but rather they are in the Nix store so those binaries need to be patched to search for their required libraries in the correct place.

The final nail in the coffin for my last go around at NixOS was I need to use a specific piece of software that does time keeping for work, and it operated fine until one day it signed me out and the button to sign back in did nothing. Even when I started the program from the CLI, there were no errors. If I can’t sign in, I’m effectively not “on the clock” so that is an absolute show-stopper for me. I replaced NixOS with Fedora, and it worked perfectly fine after that. It is a shame because I quite enjoyed the idea of having a reproducible system that allowed me to blow away the system, then reinstall it, point it to a flake I built, and run a command resulting in everything being back the way it was.

I’ve been wanting to give VanillaOS and Silverblue/uBlue a try, but to my knowledge neither of them support a dual-boot setup, and I run Windows alongside Linux for the occasional game that doesn’t work in Linux (as well as a backup environment to be able to access my tools for work, such as the scenario I mentioned earlier). I’ve heard that you can somewhat get around this by having separate drives and while my Windows install is technically on a different drive, the drive that I use for Linux also has a partition for games in Windows, as that boot drive is only a 240GB drive and I believe both of those distros require that you dedicate the whole drive to it.