algernon
Most GenAI was trained on material they had no right to train on (including plenty of mine). So I'm doing my small part, and serving known AI agents an infinite maze of garbage. They can fuck right off.
Now, if we're talking about real AI, that isn't just a server park of disguised markov chains in a trenchcoat, neural networks that weren't trained on stolen data, that's a whole different story.
I used to use flake-parts, but I organize my flakes in a very different way (I generate a single, bigass flake.nix out of tiny org files), and found that frameworks like flake-parts and flakelight just get in the way. I suspect they're useful if you're working with Nix directly, but... I don't like Nix (the language), so I do my organization outside of it.
Our twins jumping on my back. Unlike an alarm, I can't turn them off and go back to sleep.
TLDR: Is it normal to distro hop after being using a distro perfectly for so long?
I have used the same distribution (Debian) for over 20 years when I decided to change distributions and switch to NixOS. Debian was - and still is - a very fine distribution. I just needed something radically different.
So, to answer your question: yes, it is perfectly normal. Two years isn't even long.
If your goal is to get started with Emacs, and have a lot of things pre-configured, Doom will get you there much faster than starting from scratch. It is opinionated, yes, and configuring it is somewhat different than building from scratch, but I would never recommend starting Emacs from scratch for someone new to it, unless I happen to know they like to suffer.
Yes. It makes configuring Emacs a whole lot simpler than vanilla Emacs.
If you're new(ish) to Emacs, I would strongly suggest using a kit like Doom Emacs. It sets up some modern defaults, and makes it far, far simpler to set up a good environment for whatever languages you want. And the wonderful thing is that you can keep using Doom!
If they have no desire to maintain/sysadmin their own linux systems, then the best distro to recommend is whatever you can help them with, and possibly even maintain for them.
Case in point, my Wife is a very happy NixOS user, despite knowing absolutely nothing about Linux. Yet, she's on a distribution that's as far from being newbie friendly as a distro can possibly be. She's still happy with it, because I set it up for her, and I maintain it for her, she never has to install, upgrade or configure anything, ever.
NixOS?
algernon ducks and runs, fast
I'm not seeing anything wrong in the samples you provided. That's pretty much how my own NixOS configuration looks (except mine's a single monolithic flake.nix generated from Org Roam sources, but... the effect is the same anyway).
Considering the amount of CVEs the kernel puts out, I'd argue there's plenty there that's broken, and could be fixed by implementing them in a language less broken than C.