I’ve actually been getting into NixOS recently; interested in replacing an old server I’ve had for like 10 years with something I can just build from a bunch of config files.
Can confirm it is confusing and I have no idea how anything works. :D
In my searches, I’ve come across nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/ , which I’ve gone through a few chapters of - seems good so far.
Personally, I don’t see how a TPM module is more useful than full disk encryption with a password you enter on boot.
I struggle to see how it makes automatic login safer given it does nothing to protect against the really common threat of someone physically stealing your laptop or desktop.
I don’t trust any encryption or authentication system that I don’t have access to the keys for. Microsoft has also kinda made me feel it’s more for vendor lock in, like they did with secure boot.
Still, I’m probably being unreasonably pessimistic about it though - be interested to see any practical use cases of it.
I don’t know what exact situation could have happened here but I imagine a copy could have also copied the metadata into a new file. So it creates a new file as the destination (setting the birth date), then as part of copying the file it copied the access and modify times.
You know, I do wonder how many of these statistics are influenced by Linux users tendancy to use adblockers and block tracking. Linux could be more popular than it looks.
Also, they should tell us how much of that increase is due to the Steam Deck. :P
Now that they’re working on it, I’m interested in seeing how well Wayland in Cinnamon works. Hopefully it can fix some tearing and stuttering issues in my mixed refresh rate multimonitor setup.
Will also be interesting to see how the landscape with Windows goes, especially considering I’m picking up traces of discontent in their ranks. I think Valve’s actions will probably cause them to sit up and pay attention.
Recently switched to using Flatpaks instead of random .debs for a number of apps on my system. /var/lib/flatpak takes up 7GiB, which honestly isn’t that much (even though it’s like quarter of the OS size), given that’s the software I use most of the time.
Was skeptical at first about Flatpaks, but SteamOS showed me that is great at just giving OS developers access to a fully populated app store with minimal work.
Honestly, nowadays I’d say “ability to install flatpaks” should be the criteria on which we decide whether an OS is really “linux” or not (that is, SteamOS is, but Android isn’t).
Edit: Okay. I said something stupid here, my bad. What I was trying to get at is the distinction between Android, etc. and “Desktop” Linuxes like traditional distros, Chromebooks and the Steam Deck. Even though it technically runs Linux, it’s hard to argue that developers for Android are really writing apps that work on “Linux”. Wheras if someone releases a Flatpak version of their app because they think the Steam deck is cool, it works on other distros “for free”.