It was a rainy weekend, and after brewing a mugfull of coffee I sat comfortably and opened my laptop that I powered off yesterday after running an sudo pacman -Syuu yesterday to keep my Arch up to date. I like keeping things nice and up-to-date you know. The first red flags came when my fingerprint recognition wasn’t working when I tried to log in – but that’s fine, I can fix that later, not a biggie. Then the bluetooth was not seeing any devices; after 20 minutes of twiggling, reinstalling, restarting services, it did ultimately find, but didn’t cast audio through that. That’s ok, we’ve been there before, right? Wait why does my dGPU not turn on? Ok, let’s try reinstalling the drivers and cleaning some of processes, restarting. Ok now my bluetooth doesn’t work again – odd. Wait dGPU also still doesn’t work, let me remove the drivers completely… oh wait you also want to remove HIP SDK? But I need that for work… I mean, sure, ok I’ll install it again.
Morning slowly drifted to late afternoon, while I realized I have not spent a minute of that time on what I originally intended to do – recreational coding (that’s what all the normal people do on weekends, right?). After ultimately fixing all my issues I sat silently staring at my laptop, realizing I’m now roughly where I left things yesterday evening, except I burnt through a good fraction of my weekend scrolling through the Arch wiki and oftentimes toxic forums, the recurring suggestion from which was “if you can’t handle it, maybe you shouldn’t have used Arch to begin with.”
Well… maybe I shouldn’t have. …
As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.
In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.