In the early 90s at the dawn of my programing/sysadmin career. I showed up to my first week of work at “Initech” in dress pants, shirt, and tie. The senior gray beard UNIX sysadmin wore wholey jeans and ratty t-shirts. I don’t recall whether he sat me down and told me, or I figured it out on my own that to be taken seriously in a technical field you must dress down. Brilliant people look disheveled (see Albert Einstein, Steve Wozniak, et al). I ditched the stupid tie & began dressing more comfortably.
Anthropologists call this antagonistic aculturation. Us IT geeks intentionally set our selves apart from the business drones & we had to exercise our privilege of dressing comfortabley while working ungodly hours to solve impossible problems.
Now I’m the gray beard and I’ve mentoed the brighter of the pimple faced youths I’ve hired in the ancient customs of our tribe. Looking back, It seems that IT’s greatest influence on business has not been the increased efficiency of the paperless office, but the casual attire that most office workers now enjoy.
I ended up briefing some very senior leadership…in a hoody.
I brief that specific group on a regular basis and it’s usually fairly laid back but this particular meeting a new, very high profile person was attending to get up to speed. Apparently everyone knew but me because they were suited up and all of the ladies were wearing makeup and had their hair all nice. And there I was, the lead brief, in my hoody and jeans and scruffy beard.
After the meeting I realized that it probably worked in my favor. Some sort of psychological “this guy must be really good because he dgaf about dressing to impress”.
Plus I think their is exactly as you said a stereotype that the better you are at your IT stuff the less put together you have to be.
Going to sound like a boring pleb but… if your OS takes less than 1h to install and setup (which is my experience with Debian/Ubuntu on a SSD with a fiber connection, or even on a RPi with a modern microSD on an ADSL connection over WiFi) then it doesn’t matter much what you use. You grab a mug of coffee, click here or there from time to time and if your /home partition is saved you are good to go faster than most people even respond to an email.
I should add if you want to tinker “shallowly” containers are amazing. If you need to tinker deep, using a VM proper or even another physical machine (with a KVM or another keyboard and monitor) while your main machine remains untouched, it should NOT affect your uptime.
I think the funniest part of this is I was recently preparing some laptops for work with Windows 10 and it literally took 6 hours thanks to slow updates, one laptop corrupting the keyboard and touchpad driver so completely it required a full reinstall (on a fresh install mind you) and other impressively terrible snags. Granted it would’ve been more like 1-2 hours if I started with an install image that wasn’t about 2 years old, but it was still impressive how much of a time sink it was
“Stability” is probably the most mis-used word in the Linux world.
It means that how your system looks and behaves doesn’t change, which is really important for servers, especially in business, where you want to plan any change in advance before you commit to it.
Arch is not stable in this sense. It constantly changes, and those changes can come up on short notice with any upgrade.
But when people read that Arch isn’t stable, they think the system can break at any time.
I’d say this hasn’t been the case for at least 10 years now. If you RTFN (read the fucking news) and use the AUR sensibly, Arch has become a really boring system, regarding breakage.
Arch breaks all the time. It has to because upstream is usually always changing so breakage is inevitable.
Though a person’s mileage on this may vary (less update frequency, less no of programs etc.), the constant thing about rolling release is that breakages within software releases are to be expected.
My experience with Arch is that it has been very solid and stable. It is just “makes sense” for the most part and so issues are very resolvable.
If you use the AUR, you can get times when packages need to be excluded ( held back ) in order for the overall system to update. I do not see that as an Arch problem and it is easy to handle.
One thing that is an Arch problem is that, if you do not update often enough, you can end-up with outdated keys that prevent you from installing before packages. The solution is just to update the keyring before updating everything else but this is confusing for a new user and kind of dumb in my opinion. I feel like the system should do this for me.
Ironically, I find Arch is most stable if you update very frequently ( which makes the updates smaller and more incremental ). I do a quick update almost every day without any fear of breaking my system. Any “problems” I have had with Arch updates are trying to update a system that has not been updated forever. Even then, it is just a bit more work.
Another thing that can happen if you leave it too long is that packages will have been replaced by newer ones. Keeping up to date means there are only going to be a small number of those. An update after a year can run into a surprising number of them.
I dug out an old laptop that had Arch on it from 3 years before. Updating it was annoying but in the end it was totally up to date and stable.
Arch is not stable but it’s easy to fix issues arising from its rolling release nature. One of the ways being utilizing the AUR packagedowngradefor easy package version rollbacks. I should also note that the most common reason for Arch breaking is rarely ever because of the distro itself but because upstream has introduced breaking changes. You can see this when an upstream feature breaks in Arch, then Fedora picks up the same bug a few weeks/month later.
Arch is however the most solid distro I’ve ever used since I began using Linux many many moons ago.
One thing that is an Arch problem is that, if you do not update often enough, you can end-up with outdated keys that prevent you from installing before packages. The solution is just to update the keyring before updating everything else but this is confusing for a new user and kind of dumb in my opinion. I feel like the system should do this for me.
Arch already does this. Could be that your install has the keyring refresh service disabled but I’ve had it enabled for a good while now and I’ve never encountered that outdated pacman keyring issue.
Ofc, Arch users should learn how to resolve a package conflict, or how to downgrade packages, or generally how to debug the system. Sometimes you also have to migrate config files.
On the other hand, as an arch user, I can tell that it mostly just works. If you customize heavily an ubuntu, it will break more likely. And while you can fix an arch, you probably have to reinstall an ubuntu.
Moreover, Arch has a testing repository which is not the default.
My laptop has a fn lock that you can toggle, it can be very convenient to switch to f-key mode when working with some applications but most of the time I’m using volume or brightness keys.
The downside of NixOS is bad documentation. Which makes it take quite a while to get your config setup the way you want. Its so worth it though. I used arch for 5+ years and have been on NixOS for about 6 weeks now. I’m definitely never going back. My conifg is done, I barely have to change anything now. Its all saved in a git repo so I never have to make it again. I’ve already switched all of my machines over. And even a few of my friends. Which has been super easy to do cause I just give them my config then remove everything they don’t need. I’ve only been using it for a little while but it feels so reliable and Unbreakable even though I’m running unstable packages. Because if anything breaks you just go back to the last generation that worked. Which made me willing to just try anything when I was setting it up.
Also you could run Nix package manager on arch for this, but the nix package repo is amazing. It has everything i’ve needed or even thought about installing. And in my opinion its way better than using AUR packages. Most of the time you just DL them and don’t have to build them. Its just so much faster and more reliable then using Paru or Yay. Plus there is a NUR( nix user repo) but tbh I’ve never even looked at it.
The other con I know of is issues running binaries and app images. But there are was work arounds for them. I use a few app-images by just running ‘appimage-run <appimage filename>’. And so far its worked perfectly. As for a binaries you can use steam-run or I think using distrobox would work. But I haven’t had to do anything like that yet.
I found this YouTube channel quite useful when I was setting mine up. Vimjoyer
I found it fairly difficult to set up nixos on one of my machines, because it simply didn’t ship with a certain, relatively common kernel module/user space app. I also couldn’t find a usable workaround (only compiling my own kernel on every update, which is not exactly my kind of fun).
You can specify custom parts of the config that enables that module and/or extra module packages.
If you specify a custom part of the config then ye sure you’ll be compiling the kernel on each kernel update but you don’t need to manually configure it
Chrome, and browsers based on it, currently account for more than three quarters of web traffic. This gives Google a huge amount of power over the web and how people are able to interact with it. Google is also a company who’s primary business is advertising and surveillance; this means they have every incentive to curtail your ability to stop websites from spying on you and force you to use the web on their terms. They’re currently exercising this power with the rollout of Manifest V3, where they’re severely limiting the functionality of content blocking extensions like uBlock Origin.
It really does, if we give Google a monopoly over the web browser market they have way more power to do things like restricting ad blockers and tracking users. Remember: Google is an advertising company, they make their money from collecting user data and serving targeted ads. Everything else they do is secondary at this point and they will absolutely use their other products to increase the money they make from advertising as much as they can
ok… well as long as they allow Firefox and the other browsers to be fine then that’s ok, and teach people to use other browsers if they want to of course!!
Except that they’ve already displayed that they won’t. Recently, Firefox users were targeted with an artificial delay on YouTube. When caught, they claimed it was about ad blockers… Except it didn’t affect chrome users with adblock and affected Firefox users without adblock.
And this has happened multiple times over the years, where little headaches and inconveniences would crop up on Google services, all of which could be fixed by changing your user agent so the site thinks you’re running chrome.
They admitted they were slowing users with ad blockers, but many Firefox users reported experiencing the slowdown regardless of whether they used an ad blocker.
The article I linked, however, says that they couldn’t get the delay to happen at all, so it’s entirely possible it was just so poorly implemented that it was affecting people almost at random.
NixOS and nix in general is incredibly complicated imo and the documentation is… let’s just say sub par. I’d go with arch unless you really just wanna learn nix.
It’s incredibly complicated in the same way that ubuntu is incredibly complicated to a lifelong windows user.
It just requires a bit of a paradigm shift which includes a learning curve but IMO once you’re past that point it’s intuitive and even easier than other distros.
You cannot compare NixOS to ubuntu… even for as a new user to more adept user comparison, NixOS is really complicated. I’m not saying it’s bad, just that the documentation on how it works could be better. I’ve tried to use NixOS and nix itself multiple times and they were a nightmare to setup each time, especially NixOS (nix itself isn’t as complicated to me but it has some annoying things with proprietary software and not integrating with desktops at all without using hacky scripts).
Did you truly read what I said? The only logical way I can frame your comment is that you glanced at what I wrote down and started writing a reply.
To a regular average windows user, ubuntu is incredibly complicated. When you learm how it works and how you’re supposed to use it, it becomes incredibly easy. The “hard” part of ubuntu is the paradigm shift from windows to the linux ecosystem.
Similarly, to an average linux user nixos is “hard” because it does things completely differently from other linux distros. But once you’re used to it, it just makes sense and is easy.
So the comparison is average windows user -> ubuntu vs average linux user -> nixos. Not average user -> ubuntu vs average user -> nixos.
Finally: Nixos documentation is IMO 100x better than ubuntu documentation. Whenever I experience any issue with ubuntu it’s easier to just load up the arch wiki and hope it’s similar than it is to try and find anything specific for ubuntu that isn’t either 10 years out of date, a massive gaping security risk or just plain dumb. The nixos wiki may not be perfect but it has always been sufficient for my needs, and I have to run a decent amount of very niche pieces of software.
To the folks who posted useless comments instead of actually helping: Thanks for nothing.
I don’t know what you expected. There’s no need to be rude. Installing a Flatpak for example is a very valid answer and would definitely solve the problem.
And initially you didn’t even say how did you install brave, which is quite relevant in order to find a solution.
Edit: You put the error in a screenshot which leaves it rather useless for searching the error in the web. In general, I’d say that you have very little error solving skills and instead of thanking for “nothing” you should be thankful that people even bothered to answer.
“Installing a Flatpak for example is a very valid answer and would definitely solve the problem” That wasn’t a useless comment. Although it would not have helped, it was still in the right direction. Useless comments are those claiming that I should stop using brave and just stick to firefox.
“You put the error in a screenshot which leaves it rather useless for searching the error in the web” I put the screenshot so that nothing is missed and I have seen this previously.
“In general, I’d say that you have very little error solving skills” I would say that you have very weak probabilty and statistics skill, if you can generalise the entire sample space with just a singleton event.
“and instead of thanking for “nothing” you should be thankful that people even bothered to answer.” Again, not directed to people who gave technical help or asked questions but only to those suggesting I just stick to FF or give up Brave.
I don’t understand why so many people are comfortable using the Office Job OS when they could be using something that suits them.
It comes preinstalled on most computers people buy. Tbh that is mostly the reason.
It’s like if you bought a house and it came with a full closet of “good enough for you” suits and instead of going out and buying comfy clothes you just use the suits provided, especially because you know how to wear suits and haven’t yet figured out how to wear hoodies which look “harder” (ok the analogy is falling apart but ykwim).
It’s the only option I know but thankfully it is easy as piss. Just figure out your key to enter bios (usually ESC or f12, you may need to try the Fn key and f12 for obvious reasons), restart and enter the bios, slide around until you find the option, select, change, F10 to save and exit and you’re good. May even want to set a bios password while you’re in there, why not? Should take like 10-15min.
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