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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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After a decade of fighting config decay on one Linux distro after another I landed on nixos and have stuck here since, I think exactly because it avoids the problem you're describing.

If you don't fight the paradigm it's pushing (your system definition is explicit, you shouldn't try to make changes outside of the explicit system definition, package your projects for nix) there is only one way to perform each task and mistakes are all recoverable - no chasing down a nest of udev rules from the last time you tried to flash an arduino.

The downside is you have to learn their system definition language, though most relatively-modern LLMs can handle it well enough.