Which OS has the steep learning curve and is considered hardest?

  • Gentoo ( I have been using it for 3 years now, until I have to switch to Ubuntu for research sake. I love it’s philosophy and I kinda feel even my lifestyle changed after Gentoo. Tried it’s successors, redstar, cosmic mod didn’t liked much.)
  • Arch Linux ( when I got into Linux, everyone was like, I use arch btw. So tried it first with gnome, then kde, then i3, then i3 gaps and tui, then used openrc, then used runit. Helped me lot to install Gentoo. But Gentoo transformed me into something else)
  • Nix OS ( I was hearing about it since 2022. I wanted to try, and now I am gonna install and use it. I’m planning)

My question is, which among these is considered to be hardest and thus by mastering it, one can master linux to atleast some part? (excluding network management, ofsec, netsec, forensics, etc)

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
    5·
    2 years ago

    On recent hardware compiling everything from source doesn’t give that much a of a performance boost. On older hardware (i586/i686 era) this was different. But in my opinion the hassle simply doesn’t worth it anymore. My machine has plenty of unused resources and compilers nowadays do a really good job in optimizing the result.

    Can’t say anything about Nix OS. As far as I know it does some things different when it comes to configuration.

    • CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi
      3·
      2 years ago

      On recent hardware compiling everything from source doesn’t give that much a of a performance boost.

      Agreed. The only reason I considered Gentoo is because my laptop is a potato.

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬
        4·
        2 years ago

        Is it just a potato, or is it an ancient potato? Arch runs on fairly old hardware as long as it’s 64 bits hardware. The oldest device I have must be from around 2014 and it runs okay.

        • CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi
          3·
          2 years ago

          Just a normal potato. i3-3120M and upgraded to 12gb ram. Next will be the SSD as it still has an HDD. Works pretty well for everyday use, although forget about gaming.

            • CheshireSnake@iusearchlinux.fyi
              1·
              2 years ago

              😅

              no SSD yet. and I just recently got an axtra 8gb stick of ram lol. so before that swap was used a ton and it was crawling. doesn’t help that I use gnome, i guess (i’m not that good with WMs).

              i guess gaming-wise it’s a potato. lol.