I’ve been distro-hopping with intent for a while now. Not for fun — each switch taught me something fundamentally different about Linux. This is the story of how I went from Arch to Gentoo to NixOS on my main workstation.

Arch — a solid year as my daily driver#

I’ve been using Linux for a long time across various distributions, so I was already quite experienced when I moved to Arch Linux. Arch became my main operating system for over a year. Rolling release, minimal base install, and the wiki made it a solid daily driver. It taught me how to construct and maintain a system from the ground up. But after more than a year of running it daily, I wanted even deeper control — not just over what packages were installed, but over how they were compiled and configured.

Gentoo — learning to love the compile#

I moved to Gentoo because I wanted to try a source-based distro. And I genuinely learned to love it.

Compiling everything from source with Portage and USE flags gave me a level of control that no binary distro can match. I understood what every package on my system was doing because I explicitly chose its features. The make.conf, the per-package USE flags, the kernel config — it was all mine.

To mitigate compile times, I also set up and used a binhost (pre-compiled binary package repository). I really liked this setup as it drastically improved compilation times for heavy updates while still giving me custom compilation control where needed.

I kept my Portage configuration versioned in git. /etc/portage/make.conf, package.use/, package.accept_keywords/ — everything tracked. It felt like the right thing to do.

But it got heavy#

Over time, the friction added up:

  • Dependency conflicts were painful — resolving circular dependencies or blocked packages was a time sink. Portage’s conflict resolution is powerful, but when it fails you’re left reading slot conflicts for an hour
  • USE flags fighting back — there were cases where I needed a specific package, but certain USE flags prevented me from using the features I actually needed. You’d toggle one flag and three other packages would break
  • Long rebuilds — emerge -uDN @world after a USE flag change could mean hours of recompilation
  • Configuration was heavy — even with git-tracked configs, maintaining the system was a constant effort

Don’t get me wrong — Gentoo is an incredible distro. The experience and everything I learned from Gentoo are absolute gold: it taught me more about Linux internals than anything else. But for a daily driver, the maintenance cost became too high.

NixOS — declarative and reproducible#

After Gentoo, I tried NixOS. And I’m not going back.

The core idea is simple: your entire system is described in configuration files. Packages, services, users, kernel modules, firewall rules — everything. You declare the desired state, run nixos-rebuild switch, and Nix makes it happen.

What changed for me#

  • Configuration drift is gone — my system is my config. If it’s not in the Nix files, it doesn’t exist on the machine
  • Single source of truth — I know exactly what’s installed and how it’s configured. It’s almost like Infrastructure as Code, but for your desktop
  • Atomic rollbacks — every rebuild creates a new generation. If something breaks, I boot the previous one. No more “I changed something and now X doesn’t work and I don’t remember what I did”
  • No dependency hell — Nix isolates every package with its own dependency tree. Two packages can depend on different versions of the same library without conflict

Flakes#

I use Nix flakes for my entire config. Flakes bring lockfiles and reproducibility — my system builds the same way every time, pinned to exact commits of nixpkgs.

My config#

My full NixOS configuration is public: github.com/MishowHD/mishow-nix

It covers my desktop setup and, as I’ll write about separately, my server too.

The takeaway#

Each distro taught me something:

  • Arch taught me how Linux works
  • Gentoo taught me how Linux is built
  • NixOS taught me how Linux should be managed

I still have deep respect for Gentoo. But for a system I rely on every day, the declarative model wins. No drift, no surprises, full reproducibility — that’s what I want from my OS.

Note: All technical content, experiments, and opinions are 100% my own. AI tools are used solely for proofreading, editing, and translation assistance.