Linux full time!#

It’s been a year of Linux full time for me now.
After getting more and more frustrated by the direction Windows 11 is taking, I decided to switch (again).

Back in the early 2010s (?) I ran a dual boot with Arch Linux and Windows installed.
Unfortunately Arch did Arch things and fubar’d. I did not have the motivation to repair and went back to Windows.

tl;dr timeline#

Dec 2024: Fedora "I want rollbacks" Silverblue
Jan 2025: screw Fedora, let's NixOS
Jul 2025: NixOS Desktop + Homelab
Dec 2025: dammit-I-can't-configure-the-server-without-compiling-nix-while-traveling 😠
Dec 2025: Arch Desktop, Homelab Debian + Ansible 😄

why?#

Windows, you know? All the AI stuff, all the Copilot, all the unwanted.
Looking back, it turns out it was the right decision.

what?#

What is my main focus for PC use?
Gaming, Internet, a bit of programming, tinkering.

  • Steam + Proton carry a lot of gaming related weight, so all should be easy.
  • Internet is just browsers.
  • Programming is natural on Linux.

All boxes ticked, let’s go!
…we’ll figure out what does not work later and have Windows at dual boot, just in case.

how?#

In the beginning, there was… the remembering of Arch being Arch. So I wanted to be able to have easy rollbacks in case something breaks.
So Fedora Silverblue it was. I liked the commit-like approach. just revert to be able to go back, right?

After a short while it turned out to be not for me. Too complicated, to much tinkering.

Next up was NixOS. I read about NixOS/Nix a while ago and had a try in a WSL, but it did not click. I had a hard time learning the nix language, but constantly improved over time. NixOS was on my main PC, an old MacBook 12" and it went really well.

At this time distro hopping wasn’t a thing. If I felt to do so, I could just rewrite my entire Nix config and be occupied for a while. By that time the homelab became a thing. Cancel big-tech and host your own. I found NixOS really was perfect for this, so I set up with remote builds, etc.

As it is with all things out there, at some point it needs to change.
That change came with a used T14 laptop I got and wanted to try out something new.

The rollback capability is a must, but I decided to go with btrfs and snapper this time. snapper is openSuse, so I tried that. openSuse turned out to be the same overload with yast as it was 20 years ago. After some back and forth with the T14 I decided to try Arch again. There had to be some improvement over the years.

Turns out that Arch was way more performant than my NixOS installation, no idea why. Perhaps I misconfigured it too much, perhaps it is just slower. After a while dual-booting NixOS and Arch, I decided to cancel out NixOS completely.

Long story short, it is Arch + btrfs + snapper + luks now.
Switched the homelab installations to Debian with Ansible scripts.

Next up:

  • Homelab journey
  • Gaming on Linux
  • what works, what does not
  • Desktop Environments and Window Managers