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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2023

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  • I’m a bit surprised to see that you disagreed with the “NixOS is hard to configure” bit, but then also listed some of the reasons why it can be hard to configure as cons.

    By “configure”, they probably didn’t mean just setting up say, user accounts, which is definitely easy to set up in Nix.

    The problems start to arise when you want to use something that isn’t in Nixpkgs, or even something that is out of date in Nixpkgs, or using a package from Nixpkgs that then has plugins but said plugin(s) that you want aren’t in Nixpkgs.

    From my experience with NixOS, I had two software packages break on me that are in Nixpkgs - one of them being critical for work, and I had no clue where to even begin trying to fix the Nixpkg derivation because of how disorganized Nix’s docs can be.

    Speaking of docs inconsistencies you still have the problem of most users saying you should go with Flakes these days, but it’s still technically an experimental feature and so the docs still assume you’re not using Flakes…

    I was also working on a very simple Rust script, and couldn’t get it to properly build due to some problem with the OpenSSL library that one of the dependent crates of my project used.

    That was my experience with NixOS after a couple of months. The concept of Nix[OS] is fantastic, but it comes with a heavy cost depending on what you’re wanting to do. The community is also great, but even I saw someone who heavily contributes to Nixpkgs mention that a big issue is only a handful of people know how Nixpkgs is properly organized, and that they run behind on PRs / code reviews of Nixpkgs because of it.

    I’d still like to try NixOS on say, a server where I could expect it to work better because everything is declarative such as docker containers - but it’s going to be a while before I try it on my PC again.







  • Ah I see, that’s unfortunate then. For what its worth, I still think the bot is a great idea for discoverability and bridging the two services together! I hadn’t seen it before since I usually have bot users muted and happened to see this comment chain while logged out.

    I’ve given it a follow from my Mastodon account since I do tend to miss quite a few cool Lemmy posts it seems, and I think it’ll help me find some communities in general that I’ll want to subscribe to from over here.




  • Just curiosity really, it was when I first started learning Java from my father’s old textbook. The “Getting your environment setup” had instructions for both Windows, OS X, and Linux/Ubuntu.

    Of them all, the instructions for Ubuntu were the simplest (sudo apt-get install openjdk or a similar package), in order to get the Java dev tools installed.

    Ended up giving Ubuntu a look in a VM since I hadn’t heard of “Linux/Ubuntu” (which was also the first time I used a VM) during the 8.04 days!

    Funnily enough I actually put Java down for a bit since I just couldn’t get into it. IIRC though, my first project on my GitHub had something to do with Python+GTK. Then eventually I got back into Java when I discovered I could make Minecraft plugins/mods.

    Of course I was pretty young at the time, maybe 13 or 14? So I didn’t know (or would’ve cared) about the whole privacy aspect of Linux - that came much later. But ever since then, like many others, I’ve always maintained that Linux is the best development environment for me.



  • out of the box isn’t enough for a new distro.

    I’m a bit surprised that they mentioned “distribution” on the Bluefin website, as the Universal Blue site (the base project behind Bluefin) explicitly mentions not being a distro - and I know that Jorge tends to be very clear that they’re not building a distro:

    This isn’t a distribution, you can always rebase back to Fedora without reinstalling. This is a unique relationship between upstream and downstream that is popular in cloud, but still new to the Linux desktop. “Custom images” seems to be a decent place to start since that’s what people call them in cloud.





  • Sysadmins very commonly make a lot of use out of automating things with Powershell and various utilities that work with it.

    Given that a pretty decent sized portion (I’d assume at least, no numbers to back that up sadly) of the Linux user base tends to be “cut from the same cloth” in terms of having the passion to automate (and heavily customize) their system - I would think this is why you see this sentiment repeated often.