I have a 1TB harddrive on my desktop computer that isn't doing much of anything, so I'd like to dual-boot something "interesting". Suggestions are greatly appreciated, so let me know what y'all find intriguing/interesting/frustrating/innovative.
The logo is just for attention, but EFF is a great cause that we should all support.
I haven't had an opportunity to test it myself yet, but I've heard very good things about NixOS. The basic premise is that all of your system state, every config file in /etc, every package you have installed, everything, is defined by a single configuration file called configuration.nix. If you back up just your home directory and that file, you can plonk it into a brand new copy of NixOS, run a single command, and have it redownload and re-set-up everything else exactly how you left it.
I've been running NixOS on my framework laptop for almost a year now. I'm a huge fan.
The only thing I couldn't get working was a flake + home-manager-as-a-module + sway setup, but I haven't tried for 6 months or so.
Currently running flake + home-manager-as-a-module + COSMIC and it's fantastic.
I'm running Nobara on my gaming PC, and was originally planning to switch to Bazzite if anything broke, but now I'm working on prepping my NixOS config for gaming.
Speaking of, how is NixOS for gaming? I remember trying it a while ago but not being able to get the Nvidia drivers working. I've since switched to a machine with AMD graphics though.
Decided to take this as an opportunity to just go for it. It works great on my gaming PC with Plasma 6. I tested Balatro with Proton, and Baldur's Gate III.
I have a Ryzen 5800X3D CPU and an RX7900XTX GPU.
So far it seems just fine! I'm finding a few bugs here and there, but I think that has more to do with COSMIC than NixOS. I'm going to do some more testing on Plasma to narrow down where the issues are. You can see my config here:
https://github.com/thejevans/nix-config/blob/main/nixosModules/gui-applications/gaming.nix
Steam with Proton works OOTB for me if you enable the option in the system config.
It's even better with flakes. I barely touched the surface but I just run nix run . boot all and rebuilds all systems with the same build / versions. This the run . Part executes a python script that loops through each host and runs nixos-rebuild. I run my k3s cluster with it.