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The original was posted on /r/fedora by /u/Wooden-Ad6265 on 2025-06-20 04:44:59+00:00.

I am an absolute power user. I have kernel configurations for Gentoo, dots for Sway and Hyprland and I am sure I have a Niri config somewhere as well. Moreover, guess what level power user I am: I have a full blown NixOS + Flakes + Home Manager configured and ready to deploy anytime.

I have spent days and hours learning, tweaking and tinkering to get the "perfect" system for myself. I have also used Debian and Fedora for a microscopic amount of time. This post is likely a journal to myself.

I lost a major amount of time, energy and sleep. All I have ever done is chase after new stuff and never get real work done, and the funny thing is I used to pat myself for that.

Why Fedora?

I am pursuing a degree in computer science major (engineering). Learning Nix is probably gonna do good to me in the future. I made the move to NixOS knowing that. Indeed I did learn. But I found out that for scripts any many stuff, the FHS matters a lot. That's the first reason of moving away from nix. The second is lack of docs (popular and most realistic one). The third one is flexibility. Imperative distros are gonna be more flexible than declarative ones, I feel.

The reason I didn't go with Gentoo is it's niche. Build times are no problem for me, it's package availability and the reliability to use it for production environment. I love Gentoo. It's the only imperative distro I would want if I were a complete hobbyist (I did have that phase tho, as I said earlier) all-time.

Similarly Arch is not fit for production environments. I know, that it can be maitained and made stable, and the wiki is good. But still, it requires more work (for me personally). It's an amazing distro, for what a binary fully x8664 support distro can offer and a highly tinkerable distro. But it was not for me, coz I had that epiphany "What the heck, my exams are near, and I gotta do those assignments!! And I am tweaking the journal size, setting up networking and stuff! I gotta prepare for the Computer Networking exam next week. Arch wiki not gonna help me there!!!".

Ubuntu, and debian based were having very older packages.

Seeing all the above cases, and more (like low scores on my paper coz of not being able to show my postgre database in a viva voce, coz arch won't boot at that time. Or the day I needed to give a Ventoy usb to a friend but installer script won't work because again, FHS non-compliant on nixos), I saw fedora was the only spot I can call sweet: perfect release cycle, corporate backed maintainenace, large community, just the level of flexibility I need, and (this is the finest) a distro with pre-packaged dev tools. I know devtools can be installed on any distro, but listening "distro for devs" is kinda cool.

That's it. I will probably move to niri on Fedora after sometime. But now I know I am not gonna waste time on tweaking the little things.