Not only that, but requiring internet for installing also isn’t optimal for many developing countries. What, you need to bring your PC to an internet cafe to install Windows? I hope Microsoft at least offers physical USB installation drives that don’t require internet access.
Unstable is and from what I’ve heard, nixpkgs even is one of the fastest repos with updating packages (also the largest). But I still wouldn’t recommend it for OP.
I am currently looking at using OpenSUSE Micro OS for a home server. It is based on Tumbleweed and also rolling release, but it has an immutable filesystem and can automatically update and rollback. It’s similar to Fedora Core OS, which was my first choice, until the Red Hat drama.
That’s true for the configuration.nix. I still cannot fully wrap my head around using Nix Flakes for managing my nixos configuration, home manager and overlaying or creating packages. My setup so far works, but I still don’t feel like I fully understand it.
It’s great and I’m using it, but I don’t think someone coming from Linux Mint should use it right away. It can get quite complex even coming from Arch or Artix Linux.
There are some really mixed answers here. I would stick to the mainline distros and not go for a fork with a few customizations. It does depend on what you want, especially if you are willing to learn using the terminal and if you want bleeding edge or more stability. My list would be:
I haven’t really used Pop!_OS! yet, but I am getting a System76 laptop so I’ll definitely check it out. I hope they get their Cosmic desktop out soon so they can differentiate their distro more instead of being another fork with a few customizations and default apps.
(If you want to learn by pain that is)
I can’t confirm that (I distro hopped to NixOS) I can confirm that Arch is a solid distro worth learning and will give you the skills to manage it long-term. Compared to Arch based distros like Manjaro, EndeavorOS and Garuda where people tend to screw up their install easily when installing the wrong packages from the AUR and updating with dependency conflicts.
I am already trying it and I am still no expert. How I understand flakes is that it is a file with inputs, like nixpkgs and other flakes or repos you might depend on and some outputs that can be things like a nixshell with packages and environment variables, custom packages and configs like your NixOS configurations and home manager. When you use your flake for the first time, by entering a nix shell with nix develop, building a package with nix build, rebuild your NixOS system with nixos-rebuild --flake .#<hostname>, etc, nix will generate a flake.lock file that stores the hashes of all of your inputs and thus pinning the input versions. This means that if you ever run any of those commands again, you should get the same result because the inputs are pinned and the same version. If you want to update, you just run nix flake update and it will regenerate the flake.lock file with new hashes for the newest version. The advantage with flakes is that it is fully reproducible, even if one of your dependencies changes, because the hash is specified and centrally managed in the inputs of your flake.
Nix flakes can be used for your NixOS system by adding the nixos configurations in the outputs of your nix flake and adding the dependencies like nixpkgs to the inputs. You can also combine it with home manager by either specifying it as a separate output or adding it as a nixos module inside the nixos configurations output. You just copy your existing nixos and home manager config to the folder with your flake and reference them inside the flake.nix. If you added home manager as a nixos module, you only need to run nixos-rebuild switch --flake <path-to-flake>.#<hostname> and it will automatically rebuild both your NixOS configuration and home manager configuration. You can then backup the folder with your flake and configurations by uploading them to GitHub for example.
The best resource I found was this 3 hour video by Matthias Benaets: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y&feature=share7
Jerboa works just fine for me. I’m also on a Fairphone 4, but running CalyxOS with Android 13. Maybe you can try Jerboa from another source like F-droid instead of Google Play or vice versa. You can also try the IzzyOnDroid repository on F-droid.
The Gnome desktop is a pretty good middle ground in my opinion. It is in my opinion even simpler than Windows to use and allows enough customizability with extensions. People in the Linux world love to dunk on it for using slightly more RAM and not having the same amount of customizability as other desktops like KDE Plasma.