yala

I think we're misunderstanding eachother. So perhaps consider to outline if you agree with the following:

• uBlue has some systems in place that enable it to detect some breakages.
• uBlue's pipeline is such to not ship you the detected breakages.
• After a method has been found to fix a breakage (or other issues), uBlue's maintainers implement these fixes and then, the very next update, the users will receive an image that contains both the updated package and the fixes required for it to not cause problems. Heck, the user didn't know anything was up in the first place. They didn't notice a thing*.
• uBlue's issue/problem detect systems are not absolute; things might slip through.
• However, Nvidia drivers will not cause breakage that will make you shiver in fear.
• uBlue does not fix it on your device. They fix the image and that fixed image will deliver you the fix built-in; so manual intervention are a thing of the past (except for edge cases).
• Their pipeline does not require nor does it detect (through telemetry or whatsoever) the breakage on the device of the user. Heck, as implied earlier, most breakages are detected, prevented from shipping broken, fixed, ship the fixed one before any end user is disturbed by it.
• uBlue is not a Stable system (i.e. it does not freeze packages (apart from security updates) until the next major release). So yes, you receive updates all the time.
• Not being tied to legal restrictions is cool. However, a lot of derivatives do this. So this can't be its unique selling point.
• uBlue is not entirely free. Its maintainers do pay money for providing some of their services (as has been mentioned by Jorge).
• Some of their images do have testing branch; even Bazzite has.

But there is no automatic repair voodoo anywhere, on any distro. That driver is proprietary, only NVIDIA can fix it.

Consider to revisit this, cuz this is basically (at least for me) most of uBlue's schtick:

"No more building drivers on your laptop, dealing with signing, akmods, third party repo conflicts, or any of that. We've fully automated it so that if there's an issue, we fix it in GitHub, for everyone."

And the way it's setup, is so that you don't get the broken update ever on your device in the first place.

So, contrary to what you might expect, this black magic (or just excellent engineering) somehow does exist.

But they rely on rpmfusion, an external repo packaging the proprietary NVIDIA stuff for Fedora. The repo is not supported by Fedora, and the drivers cannot be fixed by anyone.

Not sure what you're trying to say here. Would you mind elaborating? FWIW, Bazzite's model (by default) allows automatic fixes to be applied to a broken driver without requiring any manual intervention from its user.

Why are you even considering Manjaro?

If gaming is the priority, then I honestly don't think anything out there can beat Bazzite in terms of ease of use, 'hands-off'-ness, robustness and stability.

Honorable mentions include: Nobara and Pop!_OS.

I just wanted to offer some nuance to the table. After everything has been learned, enabling some (otherwise complex and obscure) features can be accomplished by a single line in your NixOS config. Like, this efficiency can not and should not be ignored.

You can find some of my thoughts on Fedora Atomic in another comment found under this post. Spoiler alert; for a lot of people, it's what they seek from NixOS but (by contrast) with excellent delivery. I won't ignore that it doesn't have some of the more insane/interesting functionalities that NixOS provides. But, some just want atomicity, reproducibility and (some) declarativity; and Fedora Atomic does deliver on those without requiring you to go into the deep and learn an entire new language that's only used for managing your distro 😅.

I would argue that NixOS absolutely is the OS you get if your time is worthless

Hard disagree. Does it require you to climb through heaps of trash documentation? Absolutely. But, if you persevere, you got yourself a rock solid system that will even make Debian Stable jealous; all while requiring no maintenance.

1. Better documentation has been made available since relatively recently.

Why does your brother use NixOS in the first place?

Don't get me wrong; I think NixOS is a very interesting project with a very bright future. It probably wouldn't be an exaggeration if I said that NixOS has single-handedly inspired the current immutable revolution. However, it's also a distro that wants you to learn and digest its ways before it will return the favor.

But, based on my reading/understanding of your comment, your brother doesn't strike me as a seasoned Linux user. Am I right? Btw, NixOS is hard unbeknownst of how many experiences you got with other distros. However, I would simply never recommend a new user to use (Gentoo, Guix System or) NixOS. There are definitely outliers, but they would have to find it themselves then.

Furthermore, a CLI instruction is DE-agnostic. So you don't need to cover the same topic with explanations for at least 3/4 desktop environments. GUI instructions also change a lot faster than their CLI counterparts; so by providing the commands one provides the method with the best longevity. Overall, it's just so much more efficient.

The main difference at this point isn’t what you can do with them, but how they’re set up by default

Excellently distilled most of my post.

I wonder if distros are interested to further blur the lines themselves; like how Debian and Fedora both enable Flatpak by default.

To be honest, I think the homogenization is a net positive.

Definitely. But I feel like we fail at capitalizing on this. Though, in all fairness, the fact that derivatives have lost (some of) their significance does convey to me that we're currently in a major shift. I just wonder where we'll end up and if there's anything we (as a community) can do in order to accelerate the process.

Thank you for touching upon the human-side of things! I wonder if my original point could be distilled to "Can we, humans, simply act more rational?" 😅.

The philosophies behind the different distros is definitely something I didn't touch upon earlier. Thank you for mentioning that!

I wonder how different the philosophies are between Arch, Debian Sid, Fedora Rawhide and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Hats off for the efforts provided by maintainers. But I feel as if that potential should be better utilized (in part) to achieve greater goals.