this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
163 points (96.6% liked)

Selfhosted

60093 readers
907 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts here are to be centered around self-hosting. Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or git here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require your active participation in selfhosting or related communities, or the post will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & can be self-hosted in full without payment, and your account is at least 7 days old, your post is exempt from this rule as long as you continue to engage in comments.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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! ๐Ÿ˜Š

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Yes. Everything is NixOS. Because it's perfect for everything.

[โ€“] ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

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.

[โ€“] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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 Iโ€™m 80% there to just migrating.

[โ€“] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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!

[โ€“] StellarExtract@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago

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

[โ€“] StellarExtract@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months 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.

[โ€“] adf@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Same here, except the steam deck.

My Steam Deck also runs NixOS.

Because this way I can much more comfortably configure it, plus everything game related I automated through nix for my Desktop (e.g. mod installs, reShade config,...) immediately and without any extra steps also applies to the Steam Deck.

https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS