I don’t think that’s a very accurate assessment at all. NixOS, VanillaOS, and Bluefin are three of the first atomic distro’s I think of and they’re all heavily aimed at developers. All of them offer features to help separate development environments, which improve reproducibility of packages and environments. I prefer the Nix approach to containers, but each one definitely offers benefits for software development.
I do software development and need a ton of tools installed that aren’t just “flatpaks”.
Every atomic distro supports distrobox and other containerization tools, and many support Nix and brew.
These distros are good for people who want to treat their desktop like a phone, but flatpak kinda lets you do that on any distro. Atomic distros are great for those who want to use tools to separate development environments for purity and tinker with the ability to easily rollback.
I’ve switched instances since this comment, so I didn’t see it until now, when I’ve just happened to log back in. Really glad to hear things have generally been smooth, that’s a shame about the new device policy, though. I’ve never been a fan of Debian for use on workstations. At least with Flatpak, you can still have updated software nowadays.
Sleep issues are sadly common since sleep is weirdly complicated and motherboards are often bad at properly implementing things in a standard way. They often just implement it well enough that it works on Windows, then forget about it. If you’re lucky, a future motherboard or kernel update might fix it.
The vast majority of systems won’t have a problem, but when you do, it is a real pain in the ass.