i've watched my roommate--a person whose technical skills i respect--spend several weeks trying to set up a dual booting nixos/win10 system with uefi
i believe she's on the fifth reinstall from scratch, and having seen that breakage, i know i won't do much better, either
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Used to be in a tiny IRC channel with someone that used Xen to be able to run Windows for gaming with PCIe passthrough. 90% of their posts in that channel (not really a technical channel) was complaining about PCIe passthrough breaking and asking for help debugging it.
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yeah I've tried it, hit an issue with PAT/MTRR and write combining ranges in graphical memory, tried fixing it, decided KVM it is (I might actually set up KVM with PCIe passthrough if wine doesn't work out)
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I personally prefer having Windows on a totally different machine for gaming. For some reason I still have my better GPU in my workstation from back when I thought dual booting was a good idea but... that'll be fixed when I replace it with a new workstation.
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I have a spare TB nvme waiting for me to drop linux on it in my big workstation, and I've been looking at various distros update behavior in fear. I think systemd-boot is going to be ok, but half the distros hold it wrong
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I have quite literally been considering starting a distro just to get sane updates and reasonable systemd purity recently.
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Depends what you mean when you say sane updates.
On my workstation, I want the current stable release of software and minimal hassle so I use Arch and make Debian stable containers with debootstrap and systemd-nspawn to deal with legacy things not fond of an up-to-date system.
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I'm not a systemd fan at all, but I prefer having the full adoption of systemd in Arch as opposed to a distribution with a mess of different approaches and all kinds of distribution-specific scripts and configurations. I really don't have the time and energy to deal with Debian.
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Right, exactly, the debian/ubuntu half and half mess is a real disaster. The more I use systemd the more I like it, and they fix issues on average in less than a week after I submit them, so +1
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Basically, what you get with Arch is the current stable releases of software, as released by upstream, with minimal package splitting, downstream changes, etc. It's as close to non-existent as a distribution gets, which for me results in the least possible pain and hassle.
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It's an entirely traditional distribution without compelling or interesting technologies for updates, package management, etc. and that's pretty much what I want. I mostly just want my workstation to work properly. This works well for me. Using NixOS, etc. would be a real pain.
*nod* I've looked at it closely, and used it on a few boxes. More recently I looked at it with an eye to using it to bootstrap a package ecosystem for my distro, not sure it's quite the fit I wanted, but I learned a lot about how it's wired
I do all my work with containers, language package managers, etc. so I don't really need a fancy OS package manager. I rarely do more than updating with it and I don't really have that much installed. I like having hand-rolled containers I can just blow up and recreate as needed.
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Yeah, I'm glad to hear of another nspawn user. I've been using it heavily for the last year with all kinds of things inside. It's been working really well for me.
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