Really looking forward to this release! Good stuff, another (minor) possible improvement for wine would be native pipewire support. But this is definitely more interesting

Nobody mentioned Olive yet, that one is very good, though I’m always concerned about the continuation of its development.

Unfortunately this only affects boot messages, not normal system operation, for that you still get core dumps and kernel panics / oops

Simplified, there’s two layers to data protection, physical and logical. Linux or basically any correctly configured modern operating system provides logical protection, i.e. access under the running OS is only granted to authorized users. Granted you can still put holes in here, e.g. a webserver is misconfigured and allows access to any user to all files it can read. However, from the OS perspective, everything is fine, as the webserver can still only read what it’s allowed to.

Data encryption protects data at rest, i.e. when no operating system enforcing the logical protection is running. The case has already been described so I’m not gonna repeat that here.

It’s important to understand that in general, these two measures are completely seperate from each other. Device encryption won’t help against logical attacks, and logical protection won’t help against offline attacks. You need both if you can’t rule out an attack vector completely (i.e. your server sits in a secure safe that can’t be opened by anyone not authorized to, then encryption might not be necessary).

When not using flakes, nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade is equivalent to apt update; apt upgrade. The equivalent to dist-upgrade is nix-channel add $NEW-CHANNEL-URL nixos and then performing a regular update.

I think unstable and the fixed versions use the same Firefox package, so you wouldn’t gain anything. The difference is rather in libraries that get used and how the distribution does things. For example, the changes listed in https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/release-notes#sec-release-23.11-incompatibilities just appeared mostly one by one for me; one day, I wanted to update my system and got the error that the fonts option got renamed, so I had to change my configuration.

The fonts.fonts and fonts.enableDefaultFonts options have been renamed to fonts.packages and fonts.enableDefaultPackages respectively.

While when using a fixed point release, these changes won’t happen. Only when you switch releases. That’s what “unstable” refers to.

I’m a bit confused about what you actually want? Do you just want to update your packages, but stay on the same NixOS version? Just continue like before. Do you want to stay on your current version, but use some packages from the next version? That should also be possible if you somehow include that channel in your configuration.nix (though I don’t know how this would work in practice).

Personally, I just run with unstable though, then the releases aren’t that important.

Yeah. The UX is not in a great state. This is not an euphemism though, I think the UX is OK for advanced users, but getting used to it takes time.

Honestly given the choice I prefer the status quo, good fundamentals and clunky UX compared to the other way around – it’s all volunteer work and that’s a finite resource.

I assume you’re talking about X over SSH? That’s possible with Wayland via Waypipe. Also I’m not sure why RDP would require X, just a compositor being able to forward the video over network (which is perfectly possible with Wayland) and accepting inputs over network as well, which to my knowledge isn’t part of Wayland. Quick check says Gnome already offers RDP and that’s Red Hat’s DE.

Most interesting development. This is obviously still into the future but I also always had the impression that Redhat did a lot of work on the XOrg server. With this I think it’s actually dead once they no longer support RHEL 9 and older.

I won’t miss it, granted it’s not a bad implementation, but the design is showing its age. Apart from Wayland that I use, I’m also looking at Arcan’s progress from time to time. Obviously rather niche at the moment but projects like these make the ecosystem interesting.

And honestly the example you gave is rather a good example of a remake. The PS2 is 20 years old at this point. If the game was well made and the remake/ remaster is well-executed? Why would anyone object to this?

New and exciting games exist. This isn’t an issue. In most cases I’d even say that while money surely is important, in most cases it’s not a lack of money preventing a good game, but rather another issue that might lead to funds running out. If that makes sense.

The current situation is way better than say 25-30 years ago, and those games weren’t exactly trash.

Kind of my main gripe with YouTube repost bots here. In the end, you’re using someone else’s bandwidth and storage, you should respect their wishes. Alternatives like Peertube exist and should be used more instead of finding ways to make a website be less shitty.

Also looking into Owncast, platform effects are real but they’re not gonna go away if people just keep using exactly these services.

Thanks, I corrected it

As pointed out, they don’t use it. However, there are loose plan for KWin to migrate to wlroots one day, and in fact a hostile fork exists that is exactly that (KWinFT). So a compositor can make use of wlroots to implement Wayland functionality, sway for example does exactly that, unsurprisingly since they’re sister projects by the same author.

It should be noted that libwayland (mentioned in the patch notes) also exist, and wlroot actually depends on it, so I guess libwayland is like the lower level stuff while libwayland saves you some work to integrate libwayland into your compositor; the motto is “Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for building a Wayland compositor; or about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway.”

Why would they ditch NetworkManager though? What’s everyone’s issue with it?

I mean traditionally NetworkManager uses wpa_supplicant anyways though there is the option for iwd. So it will stay available for quite some time.

OK, I tested this on Plasma.

From my point of view, nothing else but NetworkManager makes sense to ship by default for a distribution aimed at desktop use. So I fully understand distributions doing this. My point was rather that this is not related to any particular WM / DE.

What’s broken? I just added a vpnc connection on my machine (granted can’t test it since I have nothing to connect to) but there was a vpnc connection profile until I deleted it.

Neither GNOME nor Plasma depend on NetworkManager, do they? Plasma will happily show information about connections managed by something else than NetworkManager, but won’t be able to manage them itself. But desktop distributions will most likely ship it as it covers basically all use cases.