> The initial investment into getting a usable Arch desktop was horrible.

It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine. But if you want to do something else with your computer I'd strongly recommend looking into one of the https://universal-blue.org images (I use https://getaurora.dev btw).

These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability while still staying on the edge of development. Could we call it NixOS for mere mortals? Probably not if you ask the Nix peeps. :)

> It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine.

I don't think sysadmin is fair, but certainly it's true that a lot of 'how do I do the equivalent of Windows/macOS built-in foobar' questions will have the answer 'well this is a non-exhaustive list of possible things you could install to do that'.

Which is to say that first time around it's almost inevitably going to be a lot of setup. But then it won't change, or when it does it will just be whichever puzzle piece changed - not 'Arch reimagined everything with Liquid Glass'.

I attempted to make a ostree+Nix distro a while back, but ublue didn't exist at the time and the build documentation was a masterclass in obfuscation.

Immutable is definitely the future.

>These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability

These were my hopes. Up until a new update introduced something that broke my nvidia drivers "integration".

After a few days I decided to try to update the system once more (which killed the oldest snapshot) and I was left with the system that can only be run in 1024 mode. I've tried every suggestion from the web to no avail.

For better or worse, I'm exactly the person who should go down this route.