Hi everyone,

I’ve been a happy user of Fedora Workstation since Fedora 36 on my Surface Go 1.

I really enjoy Gnome and everything is set up the way I want to.

Since I was really happy with my setup I just wanted to be able to replicate it easily through Clonezilla so that I could port it on any future computer I’d get.

Sadly, even with the help of really helpful and knowledgeable users on Lemmy, it hasn’t worked (https://sh.itjust.works/post/25963065).

So now I’m left wondering if there could be a distribution that I’d enjoy and which would be easy to deploy on another computer as I’d hate to have to configure everything on every computer I’d get.

I love Gnome but I wouldn’t be against trying something else if necessary.

What distribution could meet my needs?

  • Atemu
    2·
    3 months ago

    (nixos more or less requires you understand programming syntax for writing your system config)

    It’s technically not a real programming language but an expression language. The difference is that the former is a series of commands to execute in the specified order to produce arbitrary effects while the latter is a declaration of a set of data. You can think of it like writing a config file i.e. in JSON format.

    The syntax isn’t really the hard part here. You can learn the basics that comprise 99% of Nix code in a few minutes.
    The actually hard part is first figuring out what you even want to do and then second how the NixOS-specific interface for that thing is intended to be used. The former requires general Linux experience and the latter research and problem solving skills.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
      3·
      3 months ago

      It’s hard to say whether it’s difficult or not coming into it already knowing how to program

      More people than not struggle to come to terms with what a variable is let alone all the stuff you can do in nix

      There are definitely other hard parts, but I didn’t want to write a wall of text lol

      • Atemu
        1·
        2 months ago

        While that’s certainly true, using NixOS usually does not involve many advanced concepts or requires you to understand them.

        You can set foo = bar in a .conf file without knowing what a variable is either.