I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.
One thing that’s kind of funny to me about this is the 1940s, which has a lot of the ones from modern times…
You were probably taught at some point that we’d never be able to map out the entire human genome due to its complexity. However, in 2003, we documented the first 92%, and in 2022 we documented the remaining 8%.
I could be wrong (and I’d be super interested to hear if this was the case), but… Were we teaching kids about the human genome before we even knew the structure of DNA and before we knew that DNA carried genetic information? I know we knew DNA existed, and it was probably hypothesized that it could play a roll in genetics before the Hershey-Chase experiments in 1952, but I’m not sure whether most schools would talk much about anything resembling the human genome in the 1940s? What would have been in the curriculum then? It’s actually kind of wild how much the scientific landscape has changed since then.
You could turn invisibility on and off as you like and there would be no time limit. Your clothes would turn invisible too, and you could decide whether the items you are holding would be visible or not....
I think Lutris can install its own versions of wine which is probably why it’s not included (also you don’t need to use wine at all with Lutris). I guess I’m not surprised you ran into these issues on Arch. I wouldn’t expect this on the more mainstream distros a new Linux user would be likely to use, since these distros are more likely to take a batteries included approach to packaging. I’d hope running into missing dependencies when launching a program is a fairly uncommon experience, at least for anything installed with a package manager on most systems.
Trackballs are great! I wouldn’t necessarily recommend anybody switch if they’re happy with what they have, but they work pretty much as well as a mouse for most tasks, can be better for RSI, and don’t need as much desk space because the device is just stationary. I have both a mouse and a trackball on my desk to switch things up, but the trackball gets the most use. My main gripe with the trackball is just that you have to clean the gunk out every so often, but otherwise it’s awesome.
Qualcomm brought a company named Nuvia, which are ex-Apple engineers that help designed the M series Apple silicon chips to produce Oryon which exceeds Apple’s M2 Max in single threaded benchmarks....
I think you’ll be waiting a pretty long time for high end RISC-V CPUs, unfortunately. I don’t particularly trust Qualcomm, but I’m really hoping to see some good arm laptops for Linux.
I would disagree. I feel like nixpkgs has pretty much everything, more so than any other distro in my experience. The differences in how NixOS work can make it a little weird to run something off the cuff, but steam-run has your back in those situations.
It’s the probably the best distro for dev work imo. Nix in general is really nice for development. Games work fine — you can just install steam or putrid or whatever, and you can run normal binaries with steam-run.
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.
I think it depends on the user :P. NixOS is pretty hard to get into because the documentation isn’t great… but I’d argue it’s one of the most user friendly ways to configure a system, and it can be really nice to copy configurations from other people.
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.
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 have no idea as I’ve never been a windows user, haha. Dino is one of the examples I know about though, because I know I can’t recommend it to windows users.
A lot of open source projects do have windows versions, and the big projects that come to mind like blender or Firefox definitely do… but there’s a a lot of little pieces of software that don’t. One example that comes to mind for me is the Dino XMPP client… Linux only for now, unfortunately!
I've got a nephew who is 3-something years old. He's really into airplanes. All of the ideas of gifts I've found have either been books (I give him books, but I'd like to give him something interactive) or toys that are way above his age level....
bro pls (mander.xyz)
Just install EndeavorOS lol (feddit.de)
stolen from linux memes at Deltachat
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I made a website that tells you, based on the year you graduated high school, what your school (probably) got wrong! (yourschoolgotwrong.com)
Would you choose invisibility or teleportation?
You could turn invisibility on and off as you like and there would be no time limit. Your clothes would turn invisible too, and you could decide whether the items you are holding would be visible or not....
Crash reporting (discuss.tchncs.de)
Image transcription:...
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Imagine Linux on an Arm SoC that benchmark better than Apple's M2 Max! (youtu.be)
Qualcomm brought a company named Nuvia, which are ex-Apple engineers that help designed the M series Apple silicon chips to produce Oryon which exceeds Apple’s M2 Max in single threaded benchmarks....
Comparison between NixOS vs blendOS vs Vanilla OS: what to pick and why?
So I’ve recently taken an interest in these three distros:...
They’re in no position to complain (lemmy.ml)
Gifts for young kids who are really into airplanes? (kbin.social)
I've got a nephew who is 3-something years old. He's really into airplanes. All of the ideas of gifts I've found have either been books (I give him books, but I'd like to give him something interactive) or toys that are way above his age level....