Give NixOS a look-see. Takes a different approach to package management, but for an engineer that want’s customization abilities it’s probably one of the top choices. I don’t usually recommend this for newbies, but if you’re an engineer it won’t be too bad and simply using it may give you more skills to add to your repertoire when looking for work.

A lot of people put time into maintaining their dotfiles, but NixOS takes that idea to the infrastructure-as-code level when you use it as your daily driver.

ETA: in terms of gaming, with Wine/Proton + Steam/Lutris/Heroic pretty much any distro will be workable

I spent what felt like many moons trying to compile Gentoo when I was a kid. There was only the wiki and a gritty forum for getting answers, nothing in real-time. I didn’t have very much knowledge of the kernel or messing with modules, and was certainly lost on getting a desktop environment going even after I got past the kernel part.

It was such an experience, I decided to become a janitor.

ETA: also this guy (not strictly linux, but same vibes)

It’s for deployments and managing many environments/machines from a single CLI interface. You can do all sorts of things like push configs based on labels/groups, gather real-time data/logs, scale up/down. It’s great when you have a lot of VPS/VDS/VMs to manage and you’re not using a platform’s specific management tools.

I mainly use NixOS as a barebones backend, keep it as minimal and hardened as I can, then most of the projects/apps that run are done through something like Docker or k8s. So for me, it’s all about managing the underlying servers that provide the tools needed for a project to operate.

The tool itself is undergoing a pretty big redesign at the moment, but you can get the gist of it from the overview in the manual of the commands.

https://hydra.nixos.org/build/115931128/download/1/manual/manual.html#chap-overview

Everything-in-my-life-as-code FTW

Besides everything else you said, I especially love how you can store entire bash scripts in the nix configs, and even populate pieces of said scripts with variables if you so desire.

Also, if you run nixops, it’s much easier to work with if your dev system is also running NixOS.

I’m not a meme saver type of person, but this is a glorious exception

Some NixOS native packages and options change the defaults to be more security conscious rather than “easy to spin up.” Doing a basic nginx config in NixOS will be more secure than if you had installed it through debian’s apt or from source. Similar for ssh, you just don’t have to think as much about doing those few obvious config changes you always have to do when spinning up a new machine. Of course, there are some things you have to customize for yourself (like custom ports, paths, etc.), but they make it a little simpler by assuming you’re using NixOS in a production environment.

A couple of other links that you’ll end up referencing all the time if you get into NixOS:

• https://search.nixos.org/packages
• https://search.nixos.org/options

The first link is the native package repo, and the second link are all the NixOS config parameters for each of those packages and the system in general.

they don’t complain but I know it will make their lives easier

Perfect. So when you do provide them with an efficiency boost when they never asked about it, you can be a rockstar and get a raise. Or keep it in your back pocket until they do complain and implement it then for a similar effect 😜

Oh, sweet!

In that case, I highly recommend taking a look at some more real-world examples. That link is just something that makes self-hosting and small jobs more or less thoughtless for me.

Imagine all those config management tools built into your OS, and that’s NixOS in a nutshell. There’s obviously WAY more it can do if you look into creating your own derivations, or getting into the new-ish concept of Flakes.

Again, though, nixops is the thing that makes me continue to use it, besides just already knowing how to throw together a config in nix’s syntax. The nixops tool basically allows you to federate all your systems, tag them, group them, and do anything under the sun with each machine (or several in batches). It’s hard to get across in a simple text blurb.

In my case (SaaS), imagine having 10 devs that all want their own dev environment that mirrors production within our VPN, then you need a beta and production environment for each client that licenses the app. Each environment has a couple databases, a few different APIs, some background scraper-type applications, and front-ends for everything. Some of that stuff can live on one machine, some needs to be alone and redundant. You can see how very quickly there’s a lot of machines to keep track of.

Now I need to update a couple config pieces to match a new feature in the app itself. Well, all I gotta do is sort out the config, then run a couple nixops command to push to all the dev environments. When ready, do the same for beta, then do it for prod when the fat lady sings.

Being all within one ecosystem, focused on security hardening, is what I really like about it. Hopefully that wasn’t too stream-of-consciousness for ya, lmao.

ETA: links, also note that nixops is undergoing some serious changes in the past year. NixOS itself also undergoes changes fairly regularly in syntax as vulnerabilities are addressed and improvements made.

I can’t tell if you’re being serious or facetious 😅

I assure you it isn’t all that glorious, though, just a lot of configs. NixOS is just my favorite method of infrastructure-as-code, and in conjunction with nixops I can’t imagine going back to anything else unless the project required it for some reason. Disaster recovery is simple, and testing/pushing config changes to hundreds of machines is almost too easy.

I have a clunky set of configs, for self-hosting at home and small side-clients, I slapped together you can look at, but again it’s not all that special and I wouldn’t necessarily follow this for real production stuffs. It also doesn’t utilize any of the fancy NixOS stuff, fairly basic and Docker heavy.

https://codeberg.org/madamegaymes/NixOS-Docker-Framework

I think you misunderstood, hence the downvotes.

OP is asking what a good distro is for a media center PC, as in the PC’s video output will be connected to the TV’s video input. At which point Linux does not give two shits.

Sounds like you thought they wanted to stream/cast via some TV app or something, but that just sounds like a nightmare and I’m not sure that anyone would even want to try to do that. Just run Linux and use the TV as a big monitor, be done with smart TV garbage.

I daily drive NixOS and use it in many other situations. However, I’m also a systems engineer and it’s the distro I use for managing all the environments.

I’m sure it was a joke(ish), but definitely not for the light-hearted or fairweather penguins.

Them: You fixed it! What was it?

Me: No problem, just another ID-10-T error

Yes! I had the exact same thought after I got my Steam Deck and started using Arch again about a year ago. I remember it being clunky and awful, but now it’s so smooth and simple.

Granted I don’t do anything crazy, I pretty much just load a clip, SHIFT+R at a few time stamps, and render a new file. Maybe add a dissolve or fade. There wasn’t really much that could even do this simple stuff well before KDEnlive beefed up, at least not that I used.

The essence of “vote with your wallet.”

One day is going to do exactly nothing. A year of shrinking revenue, though…

Yea, a single day of missed profits might make them give a statement, but they’re not going to change because of it.

We need to stop buying things from these people, period, across the board.

If it’s a chain/franchised, don’t give them your money.