My drive to nix was so I could simply manage what packages I had installed with a text file. If I removed something from the file, I expect it to be uninstalled. I never found a tool/wrapper for apt to do this.

If you want to start with nixos, I would take whatever distro you are on and install nix and then home manager. Then, you can slowly migrate your user configuration over without starting from scratch. That worked really well for me going from ubuntu to nixos.

Niri looks really cool. I’ve used tiling WM before but scrolling is a unique take, perhaps more productive for some folks?

Nushell is a good one. I do data science for a living and it’d be nice to have the shell handle some small data transformations instead of writing a script in python. But all the syntax and behavior is very different than bash, so I’ve been afraid to start because of the learning curve.

I think containers get seen as overhead unfairly sometimes. Yes, its not running on bare metal, so theres a layer of abstraction, but I think in practice the performance is nearly identical. Plus, since AIO does things out of the box for you (like a redis cache for instance) it ends up being more performant than a standalone nextcloud instance that isnt configured properly.

That is to say, I use AIO without issues.

Im using nextcloud news and the associated app. I like it because it lets me play podcasts in a player built into the android app. I havent found an up to date rss reader for freshrss that does the same (read you is beautiful, but doesnt have this feature.) And I have nextcloud already up so its easy to start with.

Theres also many plugins for freshrss, including one for rss-bridge that turns urls into rss feeds. I use this for youtube subscriptions. You could also use rss bridge independently, which is what I use for nextcloud news.

I really think the learning curve will be less than you think. Please consider at least reading the installation instructions. Here’s the page for linuxserver.io’s maintained plex docker container. I’ve linked to the usage section, where you can copy the compose file to deploy it. https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-plex?tab=readme-ov-file#usage

If you use docker, it doesnt matter the distro. And to use docker, you dont really need to understand how/why it works. As long as you can take an example compose file and spin it up (docker compose up) it’ll be less complicated in the long run than managing plex on the host machine (or most software for that matter, which is why containerization is so popular.)

It seemed nice at first, but one major issue: GPU passthrough was a nightmare. It cant be done in the UI and I didnt understand fully how it worked. There are many different tutorials not by promox that are outdated or may not work. It was frustrating enough I jumped to NixOS. Other hiccups included having to go to the terminal to passthrough drives for openmediavault, but that one was kind of straightforward atleast, and it worked first time.

In hindsight, I didnt actually need to virtualize everything at that level, so I never really had a good use case for it anyway. I use containers over entire VMs.

From my short time with proxmox, I had to dive into the command line to do configuration at the host level that couldnt be done with the UI. I think nixos will help replacd those ad hoc configurations with nix options. In the many articles I read about gpu passthru, and also doing harddrive passthru, I had to work in the host debian environment.

I dumped proxmox because I couldnt get gpu passthrough to work, and havent looked back. Nixos modules and docker have served me better than VMs for my usecase.

not sure if this fits your usecase, but nixos-mailserver

I used nixos-mailserver with success, and very little configuration. Most of it was dns, and thr guide walked me through it. You would have to a nixos box somewhere though. I spun one up on my vps for it.

Yes I’ve got that set but still running into issues at runtime.

It was not configured correctly. Its a nixos bug. Thanks for pointing out the daemon config its what lead me down to solving the docker problem.

Yes thats the nvidia-container-toolkit I described above. It should be installed.

As a community, I do think we get hungup on distros. Most of them, as you mentioned, are just different defaults of the same packages.

But at the maintainer level, I do think theres a lot of work distributions do at making sure the software they choose as defaults are up to date, secure, and work with one another. I dont enounter it often, but relying on maintainers to prevent mismatched depencies ending up in the day-to-day linux user has to be worth something. And every set of defaults needs that level of assurance, I would think. Im not a maintainer, I could be off here.