Hey folks! I'm getting a fresh laptop for the first time in about a decade (Framework 16) in a couple of months and am looking forward to doing some low-level tinkering both on the OS and hardware. I'm planning to convert into a "cyberdeck" with quick-release hinges for the screen since I usually use an HMD, built-in breadboard, and other hardware hacking fun.
On the OS, I'm planning to try NixOS as a baremetal hypervisor (KVM/QEMU) and run my "primary" OSes in VMs with hardware passthrough. If perf is horrible, I'll probably switch back to baremetal after a bit. But, I'm not likely going to be gaming on it so, I'm not likely to have much issue.
Once the hypervisor is working in a manner that I like, I should have an easy time backing up, rolling back, swapping out my "desktop" OS. I've been using Linux as my pretty much my only OS for over a decade (I use MacOS as a glorified SSH client for work). Most of my time has been on distros in the Debian or RHEL families (*buntu, Linux Mint, Crunchbang, CentOS, etc) and I pretty much live in the terminal these days.
With all of this said, I am coming to you folks for help. I would like you folks to share distros, desktop environments, window managers that you think I should give a try, or would like to inflict on me and what makes them noteworthy.
I can't guarantee that I'll get through suggestions, as my ADHD has been playing up lately, but I'll give it an attempt. Seriously. If you want me to try Hannah Montana Linux, I'll do it and report back on the experience.
EDIT: Thank you all for your fantastic suggestions. I'm going to start compiling them into a list this weekend.
While I don't have much experience using nixos as a hypervisor I do have a few years experience using Proxmox on top of Debian. Managing multiple VMs and backups are very straightforward with Proxmox. As for your daily driver VM, the skies the limit, well mostly your HDD space is the limit. I've realized that after trying a ton of different distros the only real difference is the package manager and the preinstalled software.
I love Proxmox, especially with CEPH as backing storage for VMs. I've never thought about it as a local hypervisor. Might be worth a try, if I don't like NixOS.
Proxmox is questionable nowadays, you should try LXD/Incus instead. Read more here: https://lemmy.world/comment/6507871
I have meant to try out LXD for a while but it has dropped of my interest due to Canonical's shenanigans. Incus being a community fork gives me more comfort in trying it. I wasn't aware of Proxmox using hackery to make use of an ancient kernel, as seems the claim in that thread. If this is the case, I will indeed be migrating away.
Yeah I get your thing with LXD and Canonical. I've been moving a ton of clusters to Incus because of the obvious reasons and I'm happy with it, obviously the fact that the original people who made LXD on Canonical are now working on Incus is a big plus.
Regarding the Proxmox kernel you can read this: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_VE_Kernel but frankly if you search the web for "proxmox kernel bug" what you'll find are tons of different issues on almost every version. Another thing that I really hate about Proxmox is the startup, the amount of daemons and scripts they run to make the thing work.