*or distribution
Having been a (GNU-)Linux user since 2006 (desktop only), I have done what many Linux users have also done: hop around from one thing to another.
That all stopped a few years ago when I decided that I would just stick with Debian. I was happy and comfortable. It worked. I used Stable, Testing, Unstable... no issues.
That is until about 4 months ago I was cleaning and found an older laptop and decided to try something different on it: Alpine Linux.
I even wrote about it on my blog. It was such a nice installation and process that I decided to put it on my main personal laptop.
Since April I have been using Alpine and I must say I am pleased. Differences from one Linux to the next aren't much to write about. With Alpine however, I finally experienced another part of Linux that I hadn't had the opportunity to enjoy: the community.
Package requesting? Easy. Asking for help? No shame. Patience and help provided? Excellent.
None of those comments are to disparage other OS communities. It is simply that I had only ever used popular distros (Debian- and Arch-based) so I never needed to ask for help. Either way, I am still using Alpine.
So, just to repeat the titular question: what have you tried out this year? What are your impressions?
I'm usually an Arch person (btw) but I've been playing around with NixOS in a VM and I'm tempted to try daily driving it...
I was tempted to give NixOS a try as well. It seems to be highly recommended on the fediverse.
Well, I'll put it this way:
I've been away from Linux for a few years (several reasons), but this year I heard of NixOS and decided to give it a try, and I had a blast playing around with it. With how easy* and quick to configure it is, and how stable it also is, it encouraged to tinker with it more than I ever have with Linux, and I never had any really frustrating issues like I had with some other distros that I barely tinkered with.
At the very least, I think you should play around with it for a while just to see if it's something you like.
*PS: For anyone who does not have experience with Linux, NixOS is probably not a good first distro. I meant easy more so for people already familiar with Linux.
It seems like a pretty wild idea and I'm only just starting to wrap my head around it, but it's really interesting as well!
I've been daily driving it on my personal projects computer. The biggest issue for me is the promise of the project shell stops just before the application config files, meaning that you still have a shared environment for projects using the same software.
The idea for me was to have all my projects create their development environment and associated tools so that moving to a different instance was easy. Unfortunately VSCode doesn't install extensions in the project nor does it understand which to enable/disable based on inputs.