It’s not outdated, just less necessary now. With SSD’s, you can just copy your /home back from your daily backup after reinstallation, which takes all of 5 minutes.
OpenSUSE (and probably some other distros) have it built-in, you just have to activate it. If yours doesn’t, you have to install a program that does it or configure one manually.
I have daily backups for brtfs but for my / only via Linux Mint’s Timeshift. I do manual backups for some of my home folders every week. I take it the backups you mention would be lost over a reinstall?
How long that takes depends entirely on the size of your home, the number of files in there and how you store your backups.Not everyone has tiny home directories.
If your home is smaller than 2TB, it’s not an issue.
And if it’s larger than 2TB, then why the hell is all that data on your /home SSD and not a separate HDD, NAS or file server?
I think they did that because of old disks, avoid fragmentation and if one partitions is corrupted you can always recover the important files on /home and things like that, not sure neither. 🫤
Features include caching,[4] full file-system encryption using the ChaCha20 and Poly1305 algorithms,[5] native compression[4] via LZ4, gzip[6] and Zstandard,[7] snapshots,[4] CRC-32C and 64-bit checksumming.[3] It can span block devices, including in RAID configurations.
The main takeaway from the article is that the developer’s name is Kent Overstreet, who beat his bitter rival Surrey Underpath, who are both canonically related to famed developer Cornwall Midroad.
As someone else said, it’s similar to btrfs. bcachefs has a lot of functional overlap with btrfs, which is great. There have also been a few benchmarks showing that bcachesfs is faster for some situations (cold-cache warming, IIRC). One of the big advantages over btrfs is that bcachefs’s RAID is more robust - several of btrfs’s RAID levels have been marked as experimental and prone to data loss, for years. There’s been improvement in btrfs RAID lately; the skeptic in me believes this is directly a result of pressure from bcachefs, which is in a position to become a favored fs in Linux.
I really hope it would be a working one, not like xfs where your files may just disappear with no trace (never on Irix, never on any other fs) or like btrfs which may just suddenly go read only and be dead on reboot with no fsck and all data unreachable.
How hard is it to get the basics right? Doesn’t matter how much rice there is if it keeps blowing up.
Me too. I’ve run 30 years with ext and bsd filesystems with no failure. Many years with various UNIX native fs as well. But Linux xfs, reiserfs, btrfs all have resulted in catastrophic failure within a year on several machines. They’re permanently off my list, but I have some hope that someone will get a new fs right.
A lot of the time it obviously takes a little while for userland tools to catch up and for distros to include both the new kernel and userland tools for it into their latest versions but once that is done average users certainly do notice differences. Literally all the features that are talked about a lot like BPF or io_uring or all the features that make containers possible were introduced in a kernel release at some point.
Edit: Fedora got an upgrade today and vm-manager works again without any issue. Docker remains broken, maybe its matter of time. Thank you for your response!!!
Not very (new) user friendly, wouldn’t use it. Too complicated for me
BlendOS
Doesn’t offer much new stuff for me, nothing they offer is substantial for me.
Small dev team
VanillaOS
"The new Linux Mint"
Huge focus on usability and user friendliness
Apx is basically only a wrapper for distrobox
Small dev team (the same one that also develops Bottles)
Huge potential, but not quite there yet
Will recommend it to new users when it’s updated to 2.0
Silverblue
My recommendation
Is one of the oldest immutables and very well thought out
Biggest dev and userbase
You can not only install Flatpaks, but also everything else with Distrobox and rpm-ostree
Best feature: you can easily rebase to it’s other spins or the custom ones from uBlueI just rebased this weekend from the SB to the Kinoite-Spin in just one command. I was able to “change distro” without resinstalling, and KDE was installed very cleanly without leftovers.
I mean seeing how people here act after having been on nixos for a few weeks I would say it’s an apt comparison. I swear we weren’t that obnoxious when I started using the distro in 2019 D:
I don’t think it’s an apt comparison of the distros, but I agree that both have a cult-like following. I also feel like there’s a bit of a difference in the evangelism of both distros… I don’t really understand why people evangelize Arch, and my impression is largely that (1) people mention that they’re on Arch so others know they might be having different configuration issues, or less charitably (2) people mention Arch as a weird brag because it’s seen as an “advanced” distro. In contrast people seem to recommend nix and NixOS because it solves a frankly ridiculous amount of real problems that people experience with development environments, package managers, and system management. I.e., we bring up nix and NixOS because we care about you and think it might actually be useful for you. I don’t really want to dictate what other people use or brag about using nix / NixOS, but people complain to me about different problems constantly that are just resolved by nix, so it feels wrong not to mention it. It’s frustrating because it definitely makes you seem like you’re in a cult, but it really is the right level of abstraction for package management, and as a result it solves so many problems and little frustrations.
Honestly, it’s kind of frustrating to watch people not use nix. I have nix set up for the projects at work because I got tired of them not building and people randomly changing dependencies and it taking 3-4 weeks for somebody new to the project to get the thing to compile. Everybody new that I have set up with nix gets the project working instantly, and everybody else ends up spending weeks flailing around with installation. Unfortunately, I’ve given up on recommending people use nix for the project because a number of senior people have decided that they don’t like nix and there’s a bizarre amount of drama whenever I recommend a newbie just use it to get set up (even though it has always worked out better for them). It’s just not worth the headache for me to stick my neck out, but I feel bad and it’s really frustrating how literally everybody else takes 3-4 weeks to get up and running without nix :|.
I tried NixOS and was quite frustrating when I needed community help / documentation. I guess that’s the aspect of “the new arch”, the community will go “not my problem fix it yourself”. I’ve seen some good tutorials on YT popped up since then, so I’ll try it again once I get college vacation. It’s hard for me as a non programmer/psychology student. My field doesn’t overlap with programming not by a little, lmao. I think you need to recommend nix and have the way people need to do things. Like, a nix flake? You can get it to work 100 ways, and nix uses its own language and way of declaring things. That’s one thing that made me go “I just need to have a working system and I have a Arch install script done”. I like to fiddle around with things, but when you are stuck with something and there isn’t a clear path to do it, it gets frustrating. The 100 ways to 1 thing makes copycat difficult, because you have to copy the same person, which will not have all the needs for you, or find people that did their config the same way (which is really hard). Like, overlays, packaging programs, making modules, even Arch had a “this is how you get things done” wiki. I really think Nix and NixOS is really good and I will try it out again in some months.
Yeah, I don’t have good answers for you… I honestly don’t know what the best way to get people into it is. The resources really are not great.
FWIW I think when it does end up clicking everything is a LOT less complicated than it seems at first. Nix is sort of all about building up these attribute sets and then once that really sinks in everything starts to make a lot more sense and you start to realize that there aren’t that many moving parts and there isn’t much magic going on… but getting there is tricky. A lot of people recommend the nix pills, and honestly I think it’s the best way to understand nix itself. If you do earnestly read through them I think there is a good chance you will come out enlightened… they just start so slow and so boringly that it’s tempting to skip ahead and then you’re doomed. They also have a bit of a bad habit of introducing simple examples that don’t work at first which can be confusing, and eventually some of the later stuff seems like “ugh, I thought we already solved this” but it’s building up nicer abstractions. The nix pills give a pretty good overview of best practices in that sense, I think… so maybe it’s the source of truth you’re looking for (or part of it anyway). I think the nix pills are a bit more “how the sausage is made” than is necessary to use nix, but it’s probably the best way to understand what all of these weird mkDerivation functions you keep seeing are actually doing, and having an understanding of the internals of nix makes it a lot easier to understand what’s going on.
ah I think that’s where I’m at odds with a lot of lemmy NixOS users then 😅, since I am and have always been pretty hesitant to recommend NixOS to anyone in particular. I find the upfront costs of NixOS too big for me to recommend the OS to anyone who wasn’t already looking into it and knows its downsides and upsides.
I do agree however on the fact that using nix is purely beneficial. It doesn’t hurt if you just add a .nix file to your project, since it doesn’t do any harm to an already existing project. It can just install your build tools and then consider itself done, and if you don’t happen to like nix after all, the new installer makes uninstalling easier than ever. There is pretty much no downside to downloading the package manager, something I can’t say about the OS.
Having said that, I don’t think nix should be the end-all be-all standard in package management. I’m sure there will be other package managers that will be better than “nix but with yaml sprinkled in”, and are capable of improving the state of the art. At least, that’s something I hope to happen. For example, I have reservations about using a full-blown programming language for doing my project configuration (see people’s problems with Gradle for why you might not want that). I think a maven-style approach (where you’d have just limited config options, but can expand the package manager’s capabilities by telling it to install certain plugins (in the same config file!)), could be worth looking into, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t on the look out for a potential better nix alternative
For sure! I don’t think we’re actually in disagreement at all, just the limits of text communication :). NixOS is certainly less important to me and I don’t really care if people use it or not at all (it’s nice but there’s enough differences that you have to be aware of that it’d be frustrating to some people — even if ultimately those differences are something that can be worked around… If you’re well versed in nix and Linux NixOS is kind of a no brainer, though). Nix for development (or something like it) is legitimately enough of a game changer to warrant some of the evangelism in my opinion, particularly since as you mention it’s pretty much free to try on any (non-windows) system, and adding nix to a project doesn’t harm non-nix users (more than they’re already harmed anyway, haha). I’ll admit that I worry about how “nix ugly and unintuitive” seems to be a huge problem for adoption, and frankly I don’t blame people for bouncing off of nix (I bounced off of nix in 2011 or so and didn’t come back to it for like 10 years — though it was a bit of a brain worm nagging at me the whole time). That said I think the impression people have of nix being this horrible and completely ugly language (an impression I’ve had in the past as well) is also somewhat untrue. The nix language itself isn’t so bad, but the expectation is for it to just be yaml because “I just want to list dependencies”, which is fair and it might be nice if we had some better abstractions to make that more clear. All of the phases in a nix derivation are confusing and poorly documented, and some operations on attribute sets should probably just have nice special syntax instead of these fancy update fixpoints that the average developer isn’t going to understand… ultimately I’m a little unclear on how much of this is “the nix language sucks and needs to be thrown out” and how much is “we really need a better introduction to what this is and how to use it, especially with some beginner examples and best practices for different languages”. I worry a bit about non-nix nix package managers just from the perspective that it’s really nice to have the one tool to rule all development environments, but maybe fragmentation won’t be a huge problem.
Edit: Fedora got an upgrade today and vm-manager works again without any issue. Docker remains broken, maybe its matter of time. Thank you for your response!!!
One of my computers has windows on one of the ssds because I have to use windows for work software once every week or so for about 20-30 minutes and there are a few other windows programs that I need to use occasionally.
Basically I use Windows for a couple of hours a month and Linux the rest of the time.
I actually just tried Gnome Boxes and it seems to work mostly fine but the only problem I’m having is that I’m trying to run a Windows XP virtual machine but I can’t figure out how to get files from my host to the guest. Apparently, I need some software to be running on the guest but the website that I need to download the software from doesn’t work in internet explorer and I obviously can’t just download it on the host and transfer it to the guest.
While I have already found a solution (and with it found out that the software doesn’t even work in windows xp) the only way to download Boxes that I could find was through flathub, which doesn’t allow usb devices for some reason. What does work is that I can just put all of the files I want transferred into an iso file and mount it to the VM.
Also, if there is a way to install Boxes outside of flathub, I’ll have to check it out tomorrow because of late it is for me right now.
Nix is better because you can use a lock file to fetch the exact revisions of each software. Even proprietary stuff is hashed so when you download it, it’s checked to be bit identical to the lock file hash before it’s installed
This means your setup on another machine is the same as long as the lock file is the same.
Also you can switch to an older revision, mix and match stable and unstable, keep your whole setup in a git repo. It’s basically everything you ever would want from a package manager (reproducible builds already done for the minimal version, soon coming to all 80,000 packages)
How did you manage with video performance? I don’t game and have had a lot of experience with both vbox and kvm. Kvm performance for video is excruciatingly slow. It got to a point I said “that does it” and went back to vbox.
Yea KVM is great but it’s not so easy to pass device’s through. Whereas in Virtualbox you go to the menu, select devices, the type of device (eg usb) and then select the device (eg printer) to have it show up on Windows.
That doesn’t work for me as they give me error messages:
<span style="color:#323232;">j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo apt remove virtualbox-dkms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[sudo] password for j:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading package lists... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Building dependency tree... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading state information... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Package 'virtualbox-dkms' is not installed, so not removed
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo apt-get install make gcc build-essential linux-headers-'uname -r' dkms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading package lists... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Building dependency tree... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading state information... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">E: Unable to locate package linux-headers-uname -r
</span><span style="color:#323232;">j@j-HP-Notebook:~$ sudo apt install virtualbox-dkms
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading package lists... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Building dependency tree... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reading state information... Done
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libqt5help5 libqt5sql5 libqt5sql5-sqlite libqt5xml5 libsdl-ttf2.0-0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following additional packages will be installed:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libgsoap-2.8.117 liblzf1 libvncserver1 virtualbox virtualbox-qt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Suggested packages:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> vde2 virtualbox-guest-additions-iso
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following packages will be REMOVED:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> virtualbox-7.0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">The following NEW packages will be installed:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> libgsoap-2.8.117 liblzf1 libvncserver1 virtualbox virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-qt
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0 upgraded, 6 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Need to get 0 B/46.5 MB of archives.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">After this operation, 43.0 MB disk space will be freed.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
</span><span style="color:#323232;">debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(Reading database ... 642834 files and directories currently installed.)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Removing virtualbox-7.0 (7.0.12-159484~Ubuntu~jammy) ...
</span><span style="color:#323232;">debconf: DbDriver "config": /var/cache/debconf/config.dat is locked by another process: Resource temporarily unavailable
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dpkg: error processing package virtualbox-7.0 (--remove):
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> installed virtualbox-7.0 package pre-removal script subprocess returned error exit status 1
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dpkg: too many errors, stopping
</span><span style="color:#323232;">vboxdrv.sh: failed: modprobe vboxdrv failed. Please use 'dmesg' to find out why.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">There were problems setting up VirtualBox. To re-start the set-up process, run
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> /sbin/vboxconfig
</span><span style="color:#323232;">as root. If your system is using EFI Secure Boot you may need to sign the
</span><span style="color:#323232;">kernel modules (vboxdrv, vboxnetflt, vboxnetadp, vboxpci) before you can load
</span><span style="color:#323232;">them. Please see your Linux system's documentation for more information.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Errors were encountered while processing:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> virtualbox-7.0
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
</span>
I’m not sure what you mean but it doesn’t matter because VirtualBox still isn’t working and I’ve decided to uninstall it and try some alternatives that people have mentioned.
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