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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Imo, pretty much all third party candidates are doomed to lose, no matter who they are, unless they have explicit backing of one of the two major parties.

    The best thing to do is change the rules before you try to play by them. This means attacking the 2 party system by the actual weak link: the first past the post voting system. Run on and vote in candidates to the two parties who vow to dismantle it. Elections are run by the locally, so we can do this state by state, city by city. This is achievable and has already started in some cities.






  • If “D” is physically on the same hard drive, then you’ll probably want to back it up before installing. Technically, you can manage to do it without screwing everything up, but I would not trust myself to. It’s always a good idea to have backups anyway.

    Also, user files typically reside on C by default and it takes some effort to put them on a different drive. Things like Downloads, Documents, Pictures, etc. so it’s worth checking that before wiping as well.

    Additionally, you’ll probably want to format your “D” drive to a Linux native filesystem (eventually, after you back it up, because formatting results in data loss). While Linux does support NTFS quite well, it’s not perfect, and your data would probably be safer on ext4 or f2fs (depending on if you have HDDs or SSDs) (or zfs or btrfs is you’re into COW filesystems).

    In Linux, you have all of your files mounted to a single “drive” called /. Everything is below /, which is called the “root” of your filesystem.

    Typically, user data is stored in “/home” and this resides in the same directory structure as the rest of your OS, but on most systems it’s on a different filesystem or even on a different drive entirely. This is because in Linux it is routine to put a “D” drive just in a folder. On my computer, I have several of these mount points defined, so the different types of data don’t get mixed around, and I don’t have to worry about downloading too much bullshit affecting my computer’s updates.

    Hope this helps.






  • The single killer feature that convinced me to move to NixOS is the ability to very easily keep separate development environments separate. For instance, if you’re working on multiple dev projects that have different minimum requirements, and you want to ensure that (for instance) you don’t accidentally use features from after boost 1.61 for project A, because that’s the stated requirement, but you need features from boost 1.75 in project B.

    In a normal distribution, in order to set up an environment that has the proper version for project A you’d need to set up a chroot, a virtual machine, a complicated set of environment variables in a bespoke script with custom installation paths that you need to set up manually and remember to source, or just install a newer version of boost and rely on continuous integration to catch it if you screw up.

    In NixOS, you can set up different shells which all reference the exact correct version of the libraries required for every project, you can have them installed simultaneously and without conflicts, and there’s even a shell hooking program that will automatically load and unload this configuration when you change directories into and out of the project folder. It makes managing many different projects much easier. It’s like a better version of venv, but for everything.



  • Another NixOS user (and minor package maintainer, if it matters) here. Essentially, NixOS is actually rather simple to write a configuration file for a particular program once you get the knack for the nix language and learn how to workaround the sandboxing. I would actually consider it substantially less involved as compared to (for instance) creating your own Debian package.

    However, getting to this point will take a bit of effort, and this step is more or less obligatory to use software on NixOS, whereas it generally isn’t (but still is a good idea) on other distributions.