Check ublue approach like for example in this repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/beyond

In other words, leverage native OCI containers.

Gnome Console since it is consistent with the rest of Gnome and works well enough.

Those configuration files are for managing system’s package manager, so I don’t think $HOME would be a better place.

From lack of a better solution, I would symlink the folder or use stow --target /etc flag if you use stow for managing dotfiles.

Gentoo and Alpine are both really great distributions.

And with lots of polish and convenient features.

Yes, I thrive in it.

Thank you for indulging me! I tried Alpine for a moment with Sway but it was really bare and I had some issues with setting up seatd and/or elogind to ensure some usual niceties like auto-mounting of usb drives etc. I was curious how is daily-driving it experienced by others.

How do you handle lack of systemd? Do you use elogind or seatd? Do you package some things yourself considering Alpine isn’t popular as a desktop distribution?

That doesn’t mean it is the only option.

But there are other options with Silverblue.

Ubuntu usually provides you with system working out of the box. Same goes for Fedora and its spins. Arch is DIY distribution, which means that the “missing” stuff you have to install/configure yourself. archinstall gives you just a basic start.

If you don’t know your way around bare window managers, then yeah, it would be a good idea to try with things preconfigured: EndeavourOS should give you that, Fedora Sway spin also.

Or you could bite the bullet and try to provide the missing things yourself and learn in the process. What are you missing?

Stable rolling release

Void

Take this with a grain of salt.

I loved using NixOS with flakes, home-manager and custom minimalistic setup with XMonad or Sway. I was also using Nix with direnv whenever I could for my development projects. At the same time I’ve noticed that a lot of my programming focus (and time) was being used by solving niche issues with Nix, packaging things for Nix, suddenly breaking applications (because of upstream changes within nixpkgs). I’ve also had issues with using other ways of providing development environment (npm, pip stuff etc).

I was using unstable channel so breakages part is most likely on me. But apart from that I’m left with the feeling that NixOS is a huge time sink which isn’t necessarily worth it if you aren’t managing a whole fleet of machines.

Nowadays I am happy not using Nix at all. My development needs are fullfilled by what is available via dnf (Fedora package manager) and npm. I also use podman containers and flatpak a lot more since I’ve switched to Silverblue.