Do you find you need to make experimental changes to the linker often?
Back when I was a Gentoo user, I too bought the story that being able to re-emerge my whole system was some kind of performance or configuration boon. Eventually I realized that I just wanted to use my computer to get through life, that literally any operating system would work, and that any experimental hacks could simply be done when they were needed rather than trying to manage an over-complicated, poorly-supported hobby OS.
I use Ubuntu now. It sucks. But I spend my time on doing real world things now, rather than constantly tweaking my computer to eventually do a real world thing.
For work I use containers with any distribution at all. They all have the same result in a container.
> I too bought the story that being able to re-emerge my whole system was some kind of performance or configuration boon. Eventually I realized that I just wanted to use my computer to get through life...
I don't have fun constantly mucking with my settings either. That novelty long wore off long ago, like with most people who have used Linux 10+ years.
I do however get a benefit being able to set up my same config on multiple machines. For example, recently, I switched from XMonad to sway on my work computer, which necessitated a bunch of config changes. I then synced those changes over to my personal machine with https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager .
C.f. my phone just died, and I got a new android, and the android backup/sync situation gets worse and worse, and it will be a huge pain in the ass fixing my phone so i can hopefully move a few more account settings, 2FAs, etc. over.
The moral of the story is that when I do need to configure something, I want to do it once. Sysadmining repetitively is infuriating.
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The linker thing is quite different. I still do like programming (as opposed to sysadmining) for fun, and I want the tools to suck less. I also find infrastructure fun and interesting, be it computer or real world. I am a fairly prolific contributor to the Nix ecosystem, not because what I necessary want to do by myself on my own machine, but simply because I enjoy making the stuff better (and this hobby also sometimes becomes current task on the job, too).
Nix starts from a strong baseline of "sound" builds --- anything that is not sand-boxed, and therefore unlikely to be reproducible / cached correctly now pisses me off a shitty software that doesn't respect by time. The goal is to build on that foundation and also make Nix builds more incremental, so we have both a reliable and tight debug loop. Ultimately I want to see my work and the Nix community at large swamp the rest of the computing world with the productivity that is unleashed and when we stop crippling ourselves with shitty tools.
The flip side is that since goal is social, I have 0 interest in solo dog-fooding. I only use my PRs which I merged upstream; whatever benefits they would bring are certainly outweighed by the costs of living on forks all by oneself.
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If not being totally relatable (I rarely find people interested infra changes that don't immediately benefit them) hopefully it is at least clearly distinct from "building out my person nerd terrarium" customizing the computer as individualistic self-expression.
Back when I was a Gentoo user, I too bought the story that being able to re-emerge my whole system was some kind of performance or configuration boon. Eventually I realized that I just wanted to use my computer to get through life, that literally any operating system would work, and that any experimental hacks could simply be done when they were needed rather than trying to manage an over-complicated, poorly-supported hobby OS.
I use Ubuntu now. It sucks. But I spend my time on doing real world things now, rather than constantly tweaking my computer to eventually do a real world thing.
For work I use containers with any distribution at all. They all have the same result in a container.