With that, I’m starting a contest (the prize is the honor of being texted by me that you won):

Guess how much it will take me to break the system beyond repair. I will deliberately do stupid things such as using random niche bootloaders, bcachefs and whatever else is suggested in comments.

If I can’t break the system in like 2 weeks, I’m installing that NixOS config regardless of this challenge.

Yep, that’s it. Thanks for participation and don’t break your system.

Edit: I’m not going with bcachefs. Thanks Linus

    • garbage_world@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      24 days ago

      Gentoo isn’t even that unstable. The main pain point when using it is the installation or not hitting the binary cache

      • Supercrunchy@programming.dev
        3·
        23 days ago

        I agree! On gentoo even if you do manage to break your system you’d also know how to fix it (since you basically spent days installing it by hand…).

        I ran it on my pc for a few years and the only source of breakage were nvidia drivers (in the past they sucked possibly even more). I remember running it using VESA drivers for like a week until I figured out how to fix it.

        It’s really nice how much you can customize it and make it really fit your own use-case. I once ran it in a fully offline raspberry pi for 5-10 years (without updates) and it was rock solid. The hard disk it ran on and the power adapter died, but the sd card was mounted read-only so it lasted the full 10 years without any corruption. I kept a backup of the root filesystem on the sd-card so restoring it to a new disk was super-easy. I also ran the hdd in btrfs raid-1 mode with a itself (two partitions), so that it could self-recover from random corruption due to power losses (I’m not sure it’s a good idea, but it never caused any trouble) It was just running 1 service and that’s it, without any monitor or keyboard connected. I even made a small program with a single-key interface to run admin commands directly without needing a screen or any login (press “b”=reboot, “s” for btrfs scrub, for example). Trying to customize, say, an ubuntu like that would have been a nightmare. It took forever to compile everything on the raspberry pi though.