My Linux Odyssey: How I Ended Up on NixOS | nezutero<br>My Linux Odyssey: How I Ended Up on NixOS<br>26 Jun, 2026<br>A personal account of distro-hopping, window managers, and eventually finding NixOS.<br>Part 1: How It All Started<br>I started using Linux about four years ago. My very first distribution was Fedora, followed by Ubuntu, which I used for about a month before switching back. The main reason I left Ubuntu was its interface; I simply didn&rsquo;t like it. But beneath that was a deeper frustration: bloat. Ubuntu came pre-installed with so much software that, as someone still finding their footing in Linux, I felt completely lost. I tried removing things, but the sheer volume of it all was overwhelming.<br>That led me back to Fedora. I had heard it was a more sophisticated distribution, and that reputation drew me in. I ended up spending several months there, and during that time I fell deep into the rabbit hole of GNOME customization. Using GNOME Tweaks and extensions from the GNOME extension store, I spent hours adjusting every small detail I could find: dozens of tweaks, custom layouts, themes, you name it. I still have screenshots from that period.<br>Fedora GNOME Tweaks 1Fedora GNOME Tweaks 2Fedora GNOME Tweaks 3<br>But the same core frustration eventually came back. I still felt like I didn&rsquo;t have real control over my system. I wanted to decide exactly what went on it, from the display protocol to the window manager to individual applications. And that desire led me to Arch Linux.<br>Part 2: Entering Arch Linux<br>The appeal of Arch Linux is something many Linux users will recognize immediately: a minimal base, total control, and the expectation that you actually know what you&rsquo;re doing. I started using it at the beginning of September 2023, and from the start it felt like the right fit.<br>The first thing I wanted to try was something I had been experimenting with near the end of my time on Fedora: switching from a full desktop environment to a standalone window manager. The timing felt perfect. A new operating system and a completely new way of interacting with my desktop, all at once. I set up bspwm on X11, with Polybar as my status bar, Zsh as my shell, and a solid collection of plugins including syntax highlighting and autocompletion. The whole setup worked exactly the way I wanted it to.<br>Arch TTY memoriesPart 3: Going Wayland – Hyprland and Finding My Tools<br>After about four months on X11, I decided to make the switch to Wayland. At the time, even though it was only about three years ago, it was still less common than it is today; it felt more like an enthusiast choice than a mainstream one, and a less stable one at that. I started using Hyprland as my compositor, paired with Waybar, and I have been refining that configuration ever since, gradually improving it over the years.<br>Voice acting home studio on archDuring that time I also did a lot of experimenting with other tooling. On the terminal side, I went through Alacritty, Kitty, Foot (a minimal terminal written in C), and Ghostty (written in Zig, btw). For shells, I gave Fish a serious try before eventually returning to Zsh. After all of that, I settled on Kitty as my primary terminal. The deciding factor was image rendering: Kitty supports displaying images and video previews inline, which matters a lot to me because I use the terminal for almost everything, from file browsing and listening to music to watching videos. Alacritty is still the terminal I admire most on a philosophical level, given its focus on minimalism and performance, but the missing image support is a dealbreaker for my specific workflow.<br>Latest arch ricePart 4: Why I Left Arch Linux<br>After almost three years, two things pushed me away from Arch.<br>Crashes and Fragility<br>Similarly to &ldquo;with great power comes great responsibility,&rdquo; with great freedom comes great responsibility too, and the burden of managing everything yourself. Arch is amazing: rolling releases, the latest packages, a large repository, and the AUR (Arch User Repository), which was the largest package collection available before the Nix package set. Even though this is something close to a miracle for users who want real control over their systems, it also has its cost. At the end of the day, it is all about tradeoffs; the combination of pros and cons is what makes something genuinely great.<br>I experienced two major system failures during my time with Arch. I am the kind of user who constantly tinkers: trying new packages, removing old ones, cleaning the cache, experimenting with obscure forks and unofficial software. Most of the time this was fine. But I also had stretches where I skipped updates for a month or two, kept making changes in the meantime, and then ran a large update all at once. The last time this happened, something went wrong with the bootloader and the system simply refused to boot.<br>With no graphical interface available, I was stuck in a TTY with no browser, manually typing error messages into my...