A newer linux environment

Last Edited: Mon Aug 31 23:45:31 UTC 2026

Not too long ago I made the switch from Arch to Guix System as my full time home linux OS on my main laptop. Well my laptop recently broke and getting a whole new computer gives me the opportunity to give myself a whole new linux desktop experience! For the new desktop, scroll down to "the salve" (it's fedora sway atomic, if I can get blender to work at least)

The Pain

This portion of the post is taken from my home server creation diary. It got long enough that I wanted to spin it off into its own post. TLDR: The current nonguix/guix commit sha's I need for my system are broken, I can't get HIP/Rocm working, and whenever something segfaults (see point #2) it manages to take down the whole system. I'm moving on

August 29: The Pain

Dear diary, My PC is built and setup. Being able to run "guix home reconfigure [myoldconfig].scm" felt magical, but dear god is Guix system buggy on my new system. I had so few problems running guix system on my laptop that, before The Incident™ I was going to completely wipe my Arch partition in favor of just having Guix system.

Issue 1: The Kernel

I don't know exactly how this happened, perhaps because I used a nonguix install image instead of the "tried and true guix install -> setup nonguix" path, but I had multiple issues getting the kernel to build. For some reason, on the current version of nonguix+guix, I can't get the kernel to build. There's a .scm syntax error somewhere deep in the dependencies that I don't know, and quite frankly don't care, to fix. I know I should care, but the whole point of a package manager and pre-compiled binaries is that there's a trusted ecosystem that should be able to catch these errors. Alas, it hasn't. Fwiw I was able to rollback a few weeks to a working commit, but I shouldn't have to compromise on package updates (security, features, etc.) to get a working and modern kernel (and I have a Radeon 9070xt so I need a modern kernel).

Issue 2: The HIP+Rocm setup from hell

I use blender fairly often, and I just got this shiny new Radeon 9070xt that should absolutely RIP through some Cycles renders. But oh guix, it's got a non-standard file hierarchy, so it does things a bit differently. The version of blender packaged with guix is Blender 4.5.10 which is, at the time of writing a major version behind. This is not such a big deal because it's an LTS version, but I use blender for video editing, and 5.2 has some features I'd like. Not a big deal, but when I try and run it, it's completely unable to use my graphics card. Okay, I don't have rocm-hips-runtime installed, let's install it. It's packaged for guix, but after installing it, still doesn't work. Let's try another way.

I already install steam with a flatpak, and I know that my games are able to use my graphics card, so let's try that. Installing blender via steam works, but no HIPS, no way to fix that. There is also a blender flatpak, and that also installs, but still no HIPS. Allegedly there's a way to fix this, but I don't care to go through the process of getting rocm compiled for the freedesktop flatpak stuff. One final approach: Distrobox.

I didn't want to, but distrobox would let me use another distro's package management to get it to work. Getting ubuntu containers setup with podman is easy. Add on an ansible playbook I put together to install dependencies, and rocm-hip stuff with the directions listed on the website made it super easy to repeat the process when I had to teardown and recreate containers. Well, after it's all set up, it works! I go to system and I'm able to see my graphics card and my integrated graphics. When I go to click render, however, I get a segfault. No matter what I tried, changing permissions, changing PID limits on all levels of the system, trying different version of ubuntu and the library, nothing would work. I resigned myself to only using EEVEE which is not a huge deal, but it is annoying as hell.

Issue 3: Stability

Every time I had a problem in a program like the above segfaults, it would essentially take down my entire system. I don't even know why this is happening, but I'm tired of it. I had to boot into a live disk and clean a btrfs issue at one point after it broke. I'm tired boss.

Summary Skill Issue

Apologies for my assault on the tense structure of the English language, but I don't care enough about this post to re-read. Might spin up a local LLM that I can cut the corpo bullshit with and maybe I can instruct it to "rectify tenses" kinda thing as writing post-processing. Grammar aside done, but I'm guessing that, after reading my above issues, there's probably a guix wizard out there who could fix my whole system by changing a few lines in my .scm files and running ~3 guix commands, but I'm not that guy and I don't know if I care enough to be that guy.

Perhaps I'm too excited, but I admit, I'm excited to use my new toy. I've never had access to a truly powerful machine to play with every day at any time. That's crazy!! I have, for all of my hobbyist purposes, no limits on rendering and no limits on compiling things. There are no bottlenecks in my system and it will function like this for years if I treat it right. I'm stoked. I don't want to keep doing "guix pull, guix * reconfigure [file]" and hope and pray that it's fixed.

The Salve

TLRD: Fedora Atomic Sway, Maybe wayblue sway?? Idk, some version of Fedora Atomic.

A brief history of my use of linux

Ubuntu - My dad put ubuntu on an old laptop he gave to me when I was ~10, never actually used it for anything other than browser games.
Arch - When I was ~13 or 14 I started independently using archlinux. Light dev work, a little gaming, mostly web stuff. The vast majority of my linux experience is with Arch.
Nix - Tried nix for a period of weeks when I got bored one time, but it never stuck and I found it annoying to use more than useful.
Guix - Spent about a year with it, but have to move on because of its instability (ironic).
Fedora - I use fedora at work, it gets the job done.

I have a little experience dabbling in other OSs like FreeBSD (and a little dev work on the system at work, but trivial stuff like user management), and then I've also given a go at

Why fedora

What I want

My general "I wants" in an OS are:

Hardware Compatibility - Works with a Radeon 9070xt (i.e. a modern kernel/drivers -> usually this means bigger distros too, as people come across these issues and they're fixed)
Minimalism - I don't like desktop environments and other "bloat". I run a very lean system, eh, sorta, but that's okay.
Software compatibility - Needs to run Steam, Blender, OBS, Emacs, and a Web Browser, at least. I have the technical know-how and the grit to get my devtools working wherever.
Familiarity - Hate to admit it, but learning a whole new stack of technology without a MASSIVELY compelling reason is a bit of a turnoff. Luckily "familiar with many OSs/systems" is a day-to-day job requirement for me, so this doesn't disqualify really any linux system I can think of, but I don't want to come home and debug a fatal OS crash.
Large user base - Being as niche as possible, young linux user, is not a virtue. A piece of software being used by many people has too many benefits, namely that it has good guarantees that it works, will get updates, and will remain secure. This isn't universal, and it can go towards being massively bloated, but like, I'm not really thinking of something like Microsoft Excel when I talk about software.

Why nots

I'm at a point where I'm confident I could get the userland experience I want out of any linux distro, so please read all of this as "distro [based]" instead of just "[distro]". Ubuntu is debian, Cachy/SteamOS/Omarchy are all Arch.

Debian - I don't like apt, too heavy
Arch - Boring, mostly. Plus I'm not at all happy with the CVEs coming from the AURs as of late
Gentoo - Not interested in the "compile all of your own software approach" yk?
Devuan/Artix - I like systemd tbh.
Nix - I hate hate hate nixlang, and don't like the idea of depending on an LLM to manage my OS
Alpine - I'm a GCClet unfortunately.
Void linux - Too larpy + no systemd

Fedora

Fedora is really the only option left that's not mostly irrelevant (sorry openSuse! I don't know if anyone even uses OpenSuse anymore. Slackware? Who knows man), but it has a few more notable benefits for my particular use case:

Unified OS from desktop to server(s)
Widely used
Backed by a large corporation/foundation/organization (philosophically this has its pluses and minuses, but this corporation also employs me fwiw).
Supports a variety of experiences (i.e. has lots of modularity w.r.t. DE builtin)
Fedora Atomic - An immutable distro that I can rollback without having to use nix? Yes please.

aside on that point about fedora atomic: I love nix and guix, I really really do, and moving forward I'm planning on doing my userspace dev with nix flakes (sorry guix, you can't run on a mac! :(( ).

I'll be coming back to this post with a report of how fedora atomic is going (planning on installing it tonight, actually), so wish me luck.