Planning on building a PC, anything I should know?

PurrJPro@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 4 points –

I'm planning on building a PC soon and, while I have done plenty of research, I'd like to hear advice from people who have experience in the area personally. It's also just nice talking to other people in general, lol

22

You are viewing a single comment

If you plan on doing anything with linux fuck nvidia. It's such a PITA. Biggest regret of my build.

Trust me, I know (I tried running Linux on my current NVDIA PC... Never again). While I plan on running Windows (mainly due to how much support it has for like. Everything) I do plan on running Linux on a laptop in the future and possibly dual booting

I love dual booting. If I need to quickly check mails or search the web linux launches in an instant. If I need to game I dont care about longer boot time anyhow.

Yeah, that's why I wanna dual boot myself, except there's some software I need on Windows that isn't available on Linux along with games. Also, what distro(s) do you use? I've already picked out a few candidates for what I'll use, but it's nice hearing firsthand experiences

I've been using Debian because it's easy to use basically. But it's no good for tinkering. It takes ages for packages to get moved into the stable channel and testing is exactly that and causes headaches. But if you want a stable and easy to use OS Debian is great. Set it up once and you're set for a long time.

But I like to tinker so there is a clutter of packages I've installed but don't use and I've lost track of them and the configs. It runs but needs cleaning up (again).

Which is why I'm going to switch to Guix. I'm hoping to replicate the same basic set up on my laptop and desktop with only minor differences. Guix allows the declaration of the entire system and if you use the same file it will always be set up exactly the same way. Plus the fact that I can roll back the entire system to a previous state sounds really appealing for someone who likes to break stuff. That said the declaration files and anything to do with Guix itself uses Lisp and as a lisp noob I'm expecting a lot of headaches and tabbing to the manual. Also package installation and so on seems rather unintuitive but the manual is well written and exhaustive. It's more of an adventure for sure but the OS is stable and ready to use out of the box.

Ooo never heard of Guix, just did a little research on it. I am looking to switch to a declarative distro as well. I seem to have the same tendency of breaking shit when playing around with different packages and running different projects locally. I have been looking at NixOS, have you heard of it and if so, why did you choose GUIX over it?

https://nixos.org/