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! 😊

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish
      8·
      19 hours ago

      What is the learning/on-boarding curve for this?

      I ask because my home folder has a giant just file I use to script everything. I feel like I’m 80% there to just migrating.

      • StellarExtract@lemmy.zipEnglish
        31·
        13 hours ago

        I’d say that if you’re an experienced developer, the learning curve is probably overstated, at least based on my limited experience. I’m still a relatively new user, but I’m feeling pretty comfortable with it so far.

        • Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          Hitting obscure issues with limited documentation and barely any forum discussions on it in search results is killing me though. But at the same time NixOS makes a lot of things incredibly easy and offloads having to remember any changes so it’s worth all the effort for me.

      • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        19 hours ago

        It’s a very steep curve to start, with some additional minor steep parts along the way, but it’s not a long curve. Once you got the core concepts and the basic language constructs, you’ve learned most of what you’ll ever need.

        Two nice resources: search.nixos.org is super handy, and you can search GitHub with language:nix and a search term to get tons of examples from other people.

        Oh, and nix and just is actually a pretty common combo!

        • StellarExtract@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          Nice, I’ll have to remember that GitHub trick. The main thing I’ve found lacking so far is config examples.

    • ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais
      9·
      22 hours ago

      And it’s very handy for this, I have the same config for all my devices (desktop, laptop and server). Enabling and disabling different modules depending on the host it’s deployed to.

      • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        20 hours ago

        Yep, exactly.

        To be fair, if you use Debian, Arch, Fedora,… long enough, you also know how to tweak your machine for every purpose. In Nix, it’s just somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you have to know how to tweak your system to achieve… anything, and then it’s the same tweaking mechanics for every other purpose as well.