Age verification in #Gentoo: if you're using Gentoo, you must be old enough.
-
@TheOneDoc @elly @lanodan @mgorny
I just find it funny how spokespeople and users act like every Debian install is one package away from turning into sand. -
@lanodan @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc
My ideal operating system would probably be a minimal Linux/BSD (maybe even 9front) where most of the user-facing applications run in a compatibility layer.
- an MS-DOS layer: because it's a simple environment where you never have to worry about shared libraries
- a Haiku layer, because it's the last semi-popular OS that's entirely focused on desktop users
(Android technically counts, but it's built on 100GB of sourcecode and ruled over by Google)
(macOS may count if it got the Wine treatment)
- also a Windows layer, for the sake of running and reverse-engineering decades of nonfree software
Frankly tired of the FSF treating Monster Truck Madness and Paint Shop Pro like they're from the same plane of mind-numbing evil as Copilot and Recall.
(their view of reverse-engineering binaries seems to be "we don't wanna do it, because it shouldn't be necessary") -
@elly @mgorny@social.treehouse.systems @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me thats exactly the reason why I (a NixOS user) usually dont recommend it. You either find the time and endurance to learn it and where to find info or you'll embarrass yourself or worse: Suffer data loss.
@9lore @elly @lanodan @mgorny I have a good rule of thumb for this - if you use NixOS in any serious capacity then sooner or later you'll probably run into a problem that requires you to either package your own software or debug someone else's package. If that seems too scary, then that's a very good indicator NixOS probably isn't for you, at least yet.
-
@mgorny @lanodan Gentoo at least has (excellent) documentation and is easy to use. Most NixOS users I spoke to had no idea how their system *actually* worked
Just one example: at GPN2023 someone wanted to borrow my PC because their NixOS install wouldn't boot and I was like "uuh... no? i can take a look if you bring your drive though".
It was installed in "BIOS" (legacy) mode so I just shrank ext4 partition to make space for 512MB vfat, ran grub-install to that and other basic misc stuff you need to do while installing GRUB. Tried to boot it on my system (coreboot+edk2, so UEFI only) and it booted into their desktop first-try.
Then I handed them the drive back and they asked me if updating NixOS would break it and I was like "heck if I know, I don't use NixOS" (technically it shouldn't, but it's really weird and cursed from what I've seen so far so who knows).@elly @lanodan @mgorny I guess the difference is 1. the quality of docs, 2. the barrier of entry. NixOS has had famously shitty docs for ages now (I legit learned more through just reading a friend's config and asking them questions about it than through any online resource I was able to find), and combined with the fact that you very much can Just Install It and use it like a normal distro without any of the shitfuckery people normally get up to with it makes people just do that, and not learn about its internals and advanced usage.
Compared to Gentoo, where if you have no previous knowledge you won't get far without consulting the wiki, *and* the wiki is extremely high quality and easy to follow, so people end up doing that and actually learning about how their system works.
-
@elly @lanodan @mgorny I guess the difference is 1. the quality of docs, 2. the barrier of entry. NixOS has had famously shitty docs for ages now (I legit learned more through just reading a friend's config and asking them questions about it than through any online resource I was able to find), and combined with the fact that you very much can Just Install It and use it like a normal distro without any of the shitfuckery people normally get up to with it makes people just do that, and not learn about its internals and advanced usage.
Compared to Gentoo, where if you have no previous knowledge you won't get far without consulting the wiki, *and* the wiki is extremely high quality and easy to follow, so people end up doing that and actually learning about how their system works.
@elly @lanodan @mgorny I guess a better comparison as to what NixOS is is not Gentoo but rather those Arch-based distributions that were really popular a while back that were just Arch packaged together with a live environment and a graphical installer. Still Arch with all of its capabilities, but with a negligible barrier to entry.
Except then you still had the Arch Wiki to consult in case of problems, now there's. a few third-party booklets I guess? NixOS wiki is somewhat usable now, but still the easiest way to find out some things is by reading the code in nixpkgs, and a new person sure as hell ain't going to be doing that
-
@lanodan @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc
My ideal operating system would probably be a minimal Linux/BSD (maybe even 9front) where most of the user-facing applications run in a compatibility layer.
- an MS-DOS layer: because it's a simple environment where you never have to worry about shared libraries
- a Haiku layer, because it's the last semi-popular OS that's entirely focused on desktop users
(Android technically counts, but it's built on 100GB of sourcecode and ruled over by Google)
(macOS may count if it got the Wine treatment)
- also a Windows layer, for the sake of running and reverse-engineering decades of nonfree software
Frankly tired of the FSF treating Monster Truck Madness and Paint Shop Pro like they're from the same plane of mind-numbing evil as Copilot and Recall.
(their view of reverse-engineering binaries seems to be "we don't wanna do it, because it shouldn't be necessary")@moses_izumi @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc I think my ideal would be:
- Readable source code for whole default/base install, keeping external binaries as optional, and separated projects aren't vendored in
- Filesystem is reliable by modern standards (like at very least CoW with block checksumming)
- Gentoo tree or close equivalent for (third-party?) software, so less arbitrary choices inside packages
- Well documented interfaces and formats
- C isn't the only intended way to use core system APIs (Linux with syscalls+filesystems would satisfy that with better docs and machine-readable files)
- POSIX as a guide for at least one of the supported environments, other pre-existing environments can be less supported
- Nested namespaces are well supported and restricted to either same access as their parent or less
- All it's network services can be ran with least privilege -
@moses_izumi @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc I think my ideal would be:
- Readable source code for whole default/base install, keeping external binaries as optional, and separated projects aren't vendored in
- Filesystem is reliable by modern standards (like at very least CoW with block checksumming)
- Gentoo tree or close equivalent for (third-party?) software, so less arbitrary choices inside packages
- Well documented interfaces and formats
- C isn't the only intended way to use core system APIs (Linux with syscalls+filesystems would satisfy that with better docs and machine-readable files)
- POSIX as a guide for at least one of the supported environments, other pre-existing environments can be less supported
- Nested namespaces are well supported and restricted to either same access as their parent or less
- All it's network services can be ran with least privilege@lanodan @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc
Mostly thought about the user-facing side to be honest.
I've been exposed to emulators and VMs since gradeschool times, so the idea of a "consumer-grade" OS made from compatibility layers isn't that exotic to me.
Never used Gentoo, but pretty much everything about it seems to be the right way of doing things (or at least a workable foundation) and the wiki is pretty comfy.
On that note, has anyone tried bringing Portage (or equivalent) to Windows? -
@elly @mgorny This example is kind of funny because the only use I could ever see of a system like NixOS is for say a server farm, so you deploy on a test machine and if it breaks it's something you can always rollback even by just copying from another machine.
But on a standalone computer? Yeah, nah, don't.
Also NixOS so far is the only distro I've seen where so many users seem like they can't grasp other people not wanting to use it, so it pretty much became a red flag to me.@lanodan @elly @mgorny I had a conversation with someone on here recently, and we settled on that "NixOS solved all of our problems by replacing them with a set of different, more interesting problems"
And yea, on desktop it's worth it if you're a very specific type of person who has these problems more often than usual, is tired of it, and would actually find Nix's problems to be more interesting to deal with. Which does not apply to most people.
It really is an absolute gamechanger if you're managing multiple servers, though, I can provision bare-metal machines, VMs and containers that are already preconfigured for my use case with just a few lines of code, so I agree that the benefit for system administrators is far more objective than on a personal workstation.
-
@lanodan @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc
Mostly thought about the user-facing side to be honest.
I've been exposed to emulators and VMs since gradeschool times, so the idea of a "consumer-grade" OS made from compatibility layers isn't that exotic to me.
Never used Gentoo, but pretty much everything about it seems to be the right way of doing things (or at least a workable foundation) and the wiki is pretty comfy.
On that note, has anyone tried bringing Portage (or equivalent) to Windows?@moses_izumi @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc Issue I see with tailoring to a bunch of different environments is:
- Prone to the worst kind of feature creep
- Having to deal with ~everyone's bad designs without some nice gap between your system and the others
- Less/no possibility of refusing some features (specially with modern systems) while eternally chasing after them, at a pace you don't control (burnout recipe right there)
Like for example, Android is basically the Windows of phones, and there's sure a ton of stuff where it's better to be barely compliant with it, and Google is anything but slow at creating & pushing for new APIs. -
@lanodan @elly @mgorny I had a conversation with someone on here recently, and we settled on that "NixOS solved all of our problems by replacing them with a set of different, more interesting problems"
And yea, on desktop it's worth it if you're a very specific type of person who has these problems more often than usual, is tired of it, and would actually find Nix's problems to be more interesting to deal with. Which does not apply to most people.
It really is an absolute gamechanger if you're managing multiple servers, though, I can provision bare-metal machines, VMs and containers that are already preconfigured for my use case with just a few lines of code, so I agree that the benefit for system administrators is far more objective than on a personal workstation.
@lanodan @elly @mgorny I guess I can put it like this: if you're the kind of person for whom your computer is an ongoing experiment which you constantly work to optimize and set up exactly as you want, and hearing "you can declaratively manage your whole computer's configuration!" makes you go "whoa, that'd be neat" instead of "who are you and how did you get into my house", then it is probably worth trying out, worst case scenario you'll learn some things as you go. Otherwise don't bother, other distributions are a significantly better fit for you.
-
@TheOneDoc @lanodan @elly @mgorny
My disinterest toward NixOS mostly comes down to the name implying that it's the definitive form of Unix.
>I guess it's for people wo always setup the same very limited environment and at the same time somehow often break there system
I have the same view of atomic/immutable distros promoting themselves as the future while constantly playing up the disadvantages of traditional OSes.@moses_izumi @elly @lanodan @mgorny funny thing is don't give people root or sudo and the system doesn't break.
I moved my family off of windows a couple a years ago to TUXEDO OS. I removed there accounts from the sudoers group and update there systems whenever Tuxedo does a significant update.
The only problematic update was a bad pipewire version and when they went from one lts kernel to the next the default Nvidia dkms build broke as they didn't remove the dkms for the obsolete Nvidia driver first. Catched it on my test system so wasn't an issue when I updated there machines over ssh
-
@lanodan @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc
My ideal operating system would probably be a minimal Linux/BSD (maybe even 9front) where most of the user-facing applications run in a compatibility layer.
- an MS-DOS layer: because it's a simple environment where you never have to worry about shared libraries
- a Haiku layer, because it's the last semi-popular OS that's entirely focused on desktop users
(Android technically counts, but it's built on 100GB of sourcecode and ruled over by Google)
(macOS may count if it got the Wine treatment)
- also a Windows layer, for the sake of running and reverse-engineering decades of nonfree software
Frankly tired of the FSF treating Monster Truck Madness and Paint Shop Pro like they're from the same plane of mind-numbing evil as Copilot and Recall.
(their view of reverse-engineering binaries seems to be "we don't wanna do it, because it shouldn't be necessary")@moses_izumi @elly @lanodan @mgorny congratulations you re-invented windows NT as originally designed
-
@moses_izumi @elly @mgorny @TheOneDoc Issue I see with tailoring to a bunch of different environments is:
- Prone to the worst kind of feature creep
- Having to deal with ~everyone's bad designs without some nice gap between your system and the others
- Less/no possibility of refusing some features (specially with modern systems) while eternally chasing after them, at a pace you don't control (burnout recipe right there)
Like for example, Android is basically the Windows of phones, and there's sure a ton of stuff where it's better to be barely compliant with it, and Google is anything but slow at creating & pushing for new APIs.@lanodan @elly @moses_izumi @mgorny I have to say Chimera Linux with the bsd Userland is a rather good base. I like dinit and, for simple networking Network Manager slap potmon in an LXC and the DE in an other and btrfs or ZFS for snapshoting plus qemu/kvm for dos and win stuff. Works pretty well. Other than running updates there's no reason to ever touch Chimera
-
@lanodan @elly @moses_izumi @mgorny I have to say Chimera Linux with the bsd Userland is a rather good base. I like dinit and, for simple networking Network Manager slap potmon in an LXC and the DE in an other and btrfs or ZFS for snapshoting plus qemu/kvm for dos and win stuff. Works pretty well. Other than running updates there's no reason to ever touch Chimera
@TheOneDoc @lanodan @moses_izumi @mgorny speaking of Chimera, I've seen someone on IRC complaining they couldn't run musl-based system (Chimera, Alpine) because they had an Nvidia card.
I don't know specifics as to why because I haven't had any Nvidia cards in the past decade, but I got a cursed idea: rolling glibc libraries in /usr/local/lib and patchelf'ing the living crap out of nvidia's userspace stack. It probably would blow up spectacurairly, but it would still be fun to try running userspace driver stack on glibc and rest of the system on musl.
(...can you tell why computers fear me?) -
@TheOneDoc @lanodan @moses_izumi @mgorny speaking of Chimera, I've seen someone on IRC complaining they couldn't run musl-based system (Chimera, Alpine) because they had an Nvidia card.
I don't know specifics as to why because I haven't had any Nvidia cards in the past decade, but I got a cursed idea: rolling glibc libraries in /usr/local/lib and patchelf'ing the living crap out of nvidia's userspace stack. It probably would blow up spectacurairly, but it would still be fun to try running userspace driver stack on glibc and rest of the system on musl.
(...can you tell why computers fear me?)@elly @moses_izumi @lanodan @mgorny someone surely tried. I looked into it and decided It's not worth my time. I just run TUXEDO OS on the 2 notebooks that need it because one has a 1050 TI mobile the other a 1065 TI mobile. Both are 8 years old.
