Had the same experience at work. Brand new work laptop with Windows and a bunch of mandatory spyware. Personal laptop running Linux on 10 year old hardware. Linux machine is more responsive and pleasant to use.
Linux on old laptops is a joy. I spent my morning on an old MacBook Pro that I found on the recycled electronics bench when I dropped off some bottles. Runs great (Niri instead of Hyprland but similar).
The third party never forms a government but that does not mean it does not have an impact on national politics. See my other comment.
A three party system is completely different than a two party system even if only two of the parties have ever held a majority.
The NDP has been the official opposition. There are times, as in many minority governments, where the third party has more impact on national policy than the opposition does (via alliances).
As long as you focus on competent administration, the three party system will stay strong. The third party is for bringing policies and ideas to the national stage. Because any time the two most powerful parties are ignoring popular policy, the second party will partner with the third to gang up on the party in power or the party in power will court the third to prevent it. Either way, the third party gets a national voice. And the third party has to focus on popular policy because they do not have enough power to do anything else.
The issue is that politics in Canada is increasingly adopting the team sports US model. Instead of being FOR certain policies or ideas, people are AGAINST somebody else. In that game, you only need two teams.
I have not used Nix, so I may not know what I am talking about.
That said, I have been using Chimera Linux which uses the APK package manager. It works by maintaining a single file in /etc/apk/world that specifies all the packages the user wants on the system. This is used to calculate dependencies and install packages. When you “add” and “del” packages, all it is really doing is adding and removing from this list. If you remove a package, it will remove all the dependencies too unless they appear in the “world” file.
If you do not specify a version number for a package, you get the latest. But you can pin versions of you want.
If you copy the world file from one system to another, you get the same set of installed packages.
So, if I use git to backup my world file, maybe a couple of other entries in /etc, and the dot files in my home directory, I have pretty much everything I need to completely recreate my system.
Is it really worth all the extra complexity of Nix?
Honestly, not even in this case (especially given the history). Kent has a kernel tree people can pull if they need to. If it is an emergency, point people there.
If you want to use it as a server, Fedora is annoying because the support lifetimes are so short.
If you want the Fedora / Red Hat experience, consider Alma Linux. Skills wise, it is like using Res Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) which is an in-demand skill set.
Reading all the comments (between Kent and Linux), the problem is that the bcachefs dev thinks that his project (the filesystem) is the critically important one and that the Linux kernel needs to bend to his will.
I am a bcachefs user but it is pretty damn obvious to me that the production Linux kernel is more important than an experimental filesystem.
The only way to fix Xorg is to break org. It requires a redesign.
The Xorg devs chose to do that by starting a separate project. The breakage has been in Wayland, now maturing, while Xorg was left stable. Xlibre wants bring this disruption to the X codebase itself.
Debian will not run on Pentium anymore. It is not performance, it is compiler options. You need a i686 (Pentium Pro). This means none of the Debian derivatives will either.
Adelie, Arch32, and T2 all still run on Pentium though I believe.
[edit: sorry, I saw Pentium 75 from the comment above - Celeron M should be fine]
Had the same experience at work. Brand new work laptop with Windows and a bunch of mandatory spyware. Personal laptop running Linux on 10 year old hardware. Linux machine is more responsive and pleasant to use.