Ask Lemmy

Maybe I shouldn't be answering in this because I do use Linux. But there was certainly times where I tried and went back. Here's a novel.

I tried Backtrack 5, Monjaro, Arch, OpenSuse, Ubuntu, some other things I'm forgetting... over the years and none of them could really stick with me.

My problems were mostly self-inflicted, plus a lot of game and social incompatibilities. The game issues are basically non-existent for me now, but I never played the huge multiplayer, kernel anti-cheat titles, which are where most people still get stuck today.

The other half of the issue was maintenance and updating, particularly on rolling releases. I would just get fucked by bad timing and user error of not reading the forums first. Particularly with arch, either update too fast, or update too slow, and things get out of sync and borked. I also just didn't like there are tons of little tweaks that I did all over a system to customize it that mostly gets wiped out between versions or between distros; little workarounds for issues that were temporary, and I always forget what I changed and where or why. Re-installing and starting from scratch was pretty common for me.

Ultimately, I kept using Windows 10 until EOL or very close to it anyways. I was the kind of person who would do a crap ton of registry tweaking, micro-managing of services and group policy, and hand-curate PATH. I found that winget and WSL kind of offered me the best of both worlds for a time. I was the kind of power user who had uses for the Administrator account; so I just sticked with what I knew and what was working. But I really didn't want to go to Windows 11.... Windows 10 had been getting worse and worse over time.

But, then I discovered NixOS which kind of solved all my major gripes about traditional Linux, while also offering valuable features that didn't exist (at least to my knowledge at the time) on any other windows or Linux system.

Regular Linux distros were always just kind of "like windows but with more rough edges" with very little to no tangible benefits to me. The main pitch I got for Linux was one of FOSS and ethical software. Controversy aside: the Stallman angle was always a lawful good "they don't respect the user, so I won't use it." My take was a bit more chaotic neutral with piracy and cracking; "if they don't respect users then I don't need to respect their software either lol" so Linux didn't really offer enough value to justify switching and all the effort that entailed, when I could just beat windows into submission instead.

NixOS changed that equation. Instead of just "being windows but slightly worse," it offered major feature and quality of life improvements that I really valued as a user and that I could take advantage of as a programmer. It gave me an island of stability and the confidence that I could spend a lot of time learning and tinkering and none of it would really go to waste. I saw it as "the last operating system I'll ever need" which gave me the motivation to dive deep on it, which also increased my transferable/generalized Linux skills.

I still have issues occasionally, but honestly, it's not really more frequent than it was with Windows, and at least on Linux I feel like I'm fighting the problem whereas with Windows it felt like I was just fighting Windows.

Nix just happens to synergize very well whatever flavors of autism and ADHD I have, and made Linux infinitely more approachable, while also offering value that made me want to approach it.