This is a much less extreme example, but I still feel it illustrates the point:
I don’t think a 2h old comment with no upvotes (beside the auto-upvote for new comments) should place above an 8h old comment with 4 upvotes. Whether a 4h old comment with half the upvotes of an 8h old comment should place above the latter is more debatable.
I’d like to find an example with higher numbers in a 24h window but that’s hard to come by at this time.
Edit: another example:
- •
- urte bat
- •
I sympathise with the syntax often getting in the way. On the flip side I find untyped languages opaque, leaving me to guess what code actually does. Lisps are a great offender because macros, syntactic primitives and functions look the same but behave differently, and without type signatures it becomes a mess.
The thing with type systems is that they only reveal the gestalt of something that’s already there. All languages have types. It’s just that many don’t bother to correct you.
I tried to write a language parser in Guile, but when I couldn’t figure out what the different data structures actually looked like I eventually gave up.
The most confusing part of flakes is that it isn’t the default, but sort of defacto is because so many use it (myself included). At this point I feel it should be the default. The installation process doesn’t use the flakes feature so it has to be worked around and it isn’t straight forward.
Nix(OS) has a case of expert user base that aren’t motivated enough to make it easier for those unfamiliar with the concepts to get going.
Nix makes more sense if you understand referential transparency and functional programming. Even then, how a lot of nix expressions are written is quite confusing with all the self-recursive overrides, functions that are somehow also sets etc.
The best documentation and tutorials are probably somewhere other than in the official ones (though official documentation is not bad). Nix Pills and the wiki, especially.
I suffer from it too.
For programming I’ve found that the more strongly typed a language is, the less I have to worry about keeping in mind. Being able to offload a lot of basic soundness checks to the computer saves me when I lose track and allows me to focus on smaller components without having to worry about messing something else up elsewhere.
That’s about it, though, in terms of life pro tips from me. I end up having to rely on others to complete some trains of thought as I seem to get stuck at an early stage of thinking something through. That means I often start a conversation with an impression or opinion that I’ll have revised by the end of it due to factors I hadn’t considered.
Learning Nix and NixOS was the best investment I’ve ever made for my computer use since switching to Linux a decade ago or so.
The barrier of entry is so high I don’t blame anyone for not making the leap but I wish more people could enjoy the benefits. All other distros bar GuixOS feel utterly archaic and clumsily designed by comparison.
Matrix or IRC are popular. Can also be XMPP or any other open protocol. Bridge to proprietary networks if necessary but a FOSS project should never rely on Discord. https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html
You can configure NixOS to have as little or as much as you want by setting the right options. Arch allows customising to a similar level but that’s less… configuring and more installing things and tweaking stuff here and there.
To find videos across several instances there is this (as official as it gets) search engine: https://sepiasearch.org/
I’d like to write my motivations but I’d just obsess over it for hours, so I’m only listing the items.
Show:
- Black Sails
- The Expanse
- All 4 (or was it 5?) seasons of Game of Thrones
Books:
- The Expanse
- Blindsight
- Remembrance of Earth’s Past (aka Three Body Problem)
- Children of Ruin
Films:
- Lord of the Rings
There are others I enjoy despite (or regardless of) their quality, for reasons such as nostalgia, certain characters or unique atmosphere. They’re too subjective to be of much interest to anyone else though, probably.
Whether the populace has guns or not doesn’t matter for the purpose of maintaining leverage against the state when the authorities have drones, tanks and a military air force. It does however matter for everyone’s security, as evidenced by the crime rate in the US compared to countries in the EU. At least I don’t have to worry about shootings in the grocery store here in Sweden.
US centrism. I tried to unsub from the worst offending communities, but I still am unable to scroll down a page without seeing something obviously only relevant to the US or tainted by yankee culture. posts and comments assume everyone is USian and anyone who isn’t is treated like a foreigner.
It made my mood worse, affecting my daily life. So I cut down, and now I barely go there at all.
Maybe because the purpose of such communities isn’t outreach, but meant for people with something in common to exchange experiences, seek validation and find comfort, and/or solidarity. Something that might otherwise be lacking in their every day life. They might not wish to spend time and energy explaining these things to people who are different, which they may find themselves doing too much already.
Same for me. I don’t worry about anyone listening in or knowing where I go (until I do).
What I worry about is the systematic data collection and aggregation that is happening at an unfathomable scale, and what that will end up doing to global society. The amount of data is staggering. The big corporations have the ability to model and predict societal and individual trends to an unacceptable degree.
I’m not comfortable with Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple controlling the global political landscape. I will have no part in it. That’s why I care about privacy. That’s why I use decentralised platforms and partly why I use Free Software.
I am ruined by NixOS, so any distribution without declarative configuration and atomic package management with roll-backs, revisions and ad-hoc availability of packages without installing just feels archaic now.
Unfortunately there is no declarative OS that is accessible enough to recommend to casual users (in fact there is only NixOS and Guix and neither has a graphical installer or package manager), and Ubuntu-derivatives offer the least friction so I usually recommend some such flavour.
Below is a bunch of opinions:
I dunno… Ubuntu is in a weird state today. It used to be the distro for new Linux users (well that and Mint), but now that Canonical has given up on the desktop it’s just another apt-based Gnome distro and there are others that do a better job at… whatever it’s trying to do now. Without Unity there’s just nothing special about it any more - it doesn’t have anything going for it besides a still somewhat large user base. There are the flavours for those wanting other DEs but in they’re similarly unremarkable.
The problem with vanilla Ubuntu is that it became so ubiquitous and then suddenly abandoned by Canonical, fracturing the already small Linux desktop community. I think it’s most notably losing the gaming community and Valve is looking for a different distro to support and recommend - that stupid debacle where Canonical announced dropping support for 32-bit libraries with no regard for the consequences I think was the last drop (luckily the decision was reversed after the backlash).
- So it’s not the go-to for gamers. That’s Pop_OS!, Solus or Manjaro.
- It’s not for wow-ing someone into switching to Linux. In fact I don’t even know what distro that would be :(
- It’s not the go-to for moderately technical users; that would probably be Manjaro.
- It’s not for the more principled FOSS activists. That’s more likely to be Guix, Debian, PureOS or one of the more niche ones recommended by FSF.
- It’s not for the enthusiast and developer communities at large; we find our own niche distro. That leaves grandparents, CS courses, offices and “not a computer person” people, I guess.
Regarding derivatives:
Pop_OS! is probably the friction-less Ubuntu-derivative right now. Makes installation and setup very easy. No need to add some PPA for nvidia drivers released in the last few years and they’re even installed by default so there’s no unpleasant surprise for nvidia users trying to game on the terrible Nouveau driver; shitty but ubiquitous proprietary applications are available OotB and some even come pre-installed.
There’s no KDE-focused equivalent to Pop_OS!. KDE Neon should be it, but it isn’t. It for some stupid reason doesn’t provide 32-bit libraries without tinkering in the terminal, so you can’t use Steam OotB even though it’s right there in the software store. When asked about it the response is just “it’s a developer distro!” while the homepage clearly advertises it as an accessible distro with shiny up-to-date KDE software.
Honourable mention goes to ElementaryOS for its doing a good job at filling a niche (rivalling Apple in style), PureOS for carrying the torch in convergence, Linux Mint and Solus for also doing their own thing in a fairly successful manner.
Edit: I should probably commend Canonical and Ubuntu for having helped Linux adoption in the past. Even though it’s no longer what it was, we wouldn’t be here without their efforts.
Edit 2: I forgot to add that I’m quite negatively biased against KDE Neon since I recently converted my friend who after 2 months gave up and went back to Windows. They had been using KDE Neon for around a month or so and an update broke something so they couldn’t log in any more. I would have helped them solve it but it was apparently the final straw.
Shaka, when the walls fell.