Our twins jumping on my back. Unlike an alarm, I can’t turn them off and go back to sleep.

TLDR: Is it normal to distro hop after being using a distro perfectly for so long?

I have used the same distribution (Debian) for over 20 years when I decided to change distributions and switch to NixOS. Debian was - and still is - a very fine distribution. I just needed something radically different.

So, to answer your question: yes, it is perfectly normal. Two years isn’t even long.

If your goal is to get started with Emacs, and have a lot of things pre-configured, Doom will get you there much faster than starting from scratch. It is opinionated, yes, and configuring it is somewhat different than building from scratch, but I would never recommend starting Emacs from scratch for someone new to it, unless I happen to know they like to suffer.

Yes. It makes configuring Emacs a whole lot simpler than vanilla Emacs.

If you’re new(ish) to Emacs, I would strongly suggest using a kit like Doom Emacs. It sets up some modern defaults, and makes it far, far simpler to set up a good environment for whatever languages you want. And the wonderful thing is that you can keep using Doom!

If they have no desire to maintain/sysadmin their own linux systems, then the best distro to recommend is whatever you can help them with, and possibly even maintain for them.

Case in point, my Wife is a very happy NixOS user, despite knowing absolutely nothing about Linux. Yet, she’s on a distribution that’s as far from being newbie friendly as a distro can possibly be. She’s still happy with it, because I set it up for her, and I maintain it for her, she never has to install, upgrade or configure anything, ever.

NixOS?

algernon ducks and runs, fast

I’m not seeing anything wrong in the samples you provided. That’s pretty much how my own NixOS configuration looks (except mine’s a single monolithic flake.nix generated from Org Roam sources, but… the effect is the same anyway).

I’d say “under no circumstances”. When building for production, you want to build on a stable foundation. LFS isn’t that, it’s an educational tool. It does not result in a maintainable, robust system. It requires tremendous amounts of work to keep it secure and updated: there’s no package manager, no repository you can pull from, no nothing. You have to build an entire distribution on your own. Outside of educational purposes, I’m having trouble to imagine any situation where that might be a good idea.

No, not even embedded. There were always distros targetting embedded systems, LFS was never a good choice there either. It was much more straightforward to strip down - say - Debian for a limited device, than to build something from scratch for it. (I spent a few years building and operating embedded Linux systems at the early 2000s, we built it on a stripped down Debian.)

Invent a time machine. Go back in time. Study.

Failing that, learn from your mistakes, and next time… well… study.

Is it by a for-profit company, in year 3190 of our lady Discord?

Then nope, it is not.*

(* some exceptions may apply, not in this case though)

Where does “declaratively configure your entire home network with nixos” go on this scale?

Does the target layer (the number layer) have to be a layer number greater than the starting layer? Number layer is layer 4, and QWERTY is 9 - do I need to move 4 to 10? Is there some other, common, issue I’m encountering?

Yes, you’ll need to move the number layer, to have a higher index than the QWERTY layer. In QMK, layers are index-ordered (see the docs here), no matter the order you activate them. If you activate layer 9 (qwerty) and layer 4 (numpad), then even if you activated layer 4 later, it will still be below layer 9. So any key that is not transparent on 9, will be looked up from 9. Only transparent keys will be looked up from layers below.

My Emacs needed a bootloader.

I have Emacs, and I have my NixOS configuration. That’s all the GUI system configuration I need.

Lie to myself, and chug another cup of coffee.

In our kids’ elementary school, the rule at the start of year was that kids tell the teacher they have to go, then they simply go. Notifying the teacher is mandatory, 'cos they are responsible for the kids, they need to know where they are.

This was slightly changed since, because of bullies. While the vast majority of kids can go to the bathroom whenever they want, bullies don’t: they can only go alone, or supervised. So if there’s anyone else out, from any class, they have to wait. If it is urgent, a teacher or another adult will go with them, and stand by the door, close enough to intervene if need be.

Both KDE and GNOME are good DEs (and there are many other great ones, and you don’t even need to use a DE; a mismash of applications with your compositor of choice works just aswell - but I digress), you can’t really go wrong with either.

For someone new to Linux, I would likely recommend GNOME, because it is more opinionated. While KDE is a lot more configurable, that also has a huge downside: configuration fatigue. GNOME is more restrictive, yes, but that has the advantage of not overwhelming you right out of the box.

If you like and wish to tinker, though, go with KDE. If you want to gently ease into Linux, go with GNOME first, and once you’re comfortable, you can still experiment with KDE. You can install both, and switch between them simply by logging out of one and into the other.

To add some nuance to the rest of the comments posted here: GPL’d code can be made proprietary, if the copyright holders all agree. For example, given a project that requires copyright assignment, if the project owner decides to take it proprietary, they can do that, because they’re the copyright owner. GPL alone is not enough to keep a codebase FLOSS. Luckily, both the kernel and git have hundreds of copyright owners (and does not require copyright assignment), so legally changing the license of either of them is practically impossible. So, really, Linus wouldn’t be able to take anything, code wise. He could take his future work, yeah, but he hasn’t been doing much development for the past decade.

Otherwise… He let go of git pretty early on, and it’s been maintained by Junio ever since. So nothing would happen there whatsoever, Linus’ retirement (friendly or otherwise) would be inconsequential for git.

The kernel has capable maintainers who have been maintaining stable trees for a long while now (often with companies backing them), and people who have been maintaining large subtrees. There’s a considerable overlap there, too. In short, there are a fair number of people who could fill in for Linus in a pinch. There’d be a small hiccup, and that’s about it. His skills and experience would be missed, but it wouldn’t cause any lasting harm.

My bank app does not function under Graphene, because my bank is doing anything in its power to force using a stock Android. I have friends, who use the same bank, and while the bank app works under Graphene from time to time, it is broken often enough to render it unusable.

But it doesn’t matter, because Graphene does not support my phone anyway. As I wrote: most alternative operating systems for phones support only a very limited set of phones. Mine’s not one of them.