I’ve been using Debian because it’s easy to use basically. But it’s no good for tinkering. It takes ages for packages to get moved into the stable channel and testing is exactly that and causes headaches. But if you want a stable and easy to use OS Debian is great. Set it up once and you’re set for a long time.
But I like to tinker so there is a clutter of packages I’ve installed but don’t use and I’ve lost track of them and the configs. It runs but needs cleaning up (again).
Which is why I’m going to switch to Guix. I’m hoping to replicate the same basic set up on my laptop and desktop with only minor differences. Guix allows the declaration of the entire system and if you use the same file it will always be set up exactly the same way. Plus the fact that I can roll back the entire system to a previous state sounds really appealing for someone who likes to break stuff. That said the declaration files and anything to do with Guix itself uses Lisp and as a lisp noob I’m expecting a lot of headaches and tabbing to the manual. Also package installation and so on seems rather unintuitive but the manual is well written and exhaustive. It’s more of an adventure for sure but the OS is stable and ready to use out of the box.
I’m looking into getting into lisp as I switched to Emacs as well. Lisp declaration files make more sense to me as it might be that I want to declare my setup programmatically. Also it’s very radical about the software it offers being free. Like extremely so, you might have some issues with drivers if the official ones have binary blobs. So definitely take that under advisement as well. It does work with nvidia graphics well enough though I haven’t stress tested it really.