Debianties

When the spacing is tight
and the difference is slight, that’s a moire!

As someone who tried NixOS recently for the first time, it feels like an uphill battle.

Some immediate concerns I have as a newbie are below. Bear in mind that I’m a single user on a single system.

Organisation is daunting as fuck
Even a relatively simple desktop config seems rather large to me. I expect the complexity of my config to balloon if I were to use this as my primary OS. There seems to be no consensus on how things should be separated.
I’ve heard home-manager is good, but I don’t really get the point of it. What does it achieve for me that editing configuration.nix doesn’t? I’ve yet to find a benefit. It’s just another place to dump endless configs and another command to remember to run.

Installing software feels like the roll of a dice
I installed NixOS to try Hyprland, and their docs say to just use programs.hyprland.enable = true, which I’ve come to learn is a module. But that’s not the only way to install things! You also have system packages and user packages! I just want to install some software, I don’t want to have to look up whether it’s a module or a package every time I want something new. I’m never sure what I should add to which section. No other distro that I know of has this problem! Having 3 different places to add software seems excessive. What am I using? Windows? And now there’s Flakes too. I’m sure they’re great, but right now I just see them as yet another way to install software on Nix. Great.

There’s more, but I’ll leave it there for now. I’m sure there are reasonable answers to all that I’ve said, but I’m just frustrated. I really want to like Nix, but it’s not making it easy.

tl;dr: Two things. 1) Lack of consensus on how configs are organised is confusing. 2) Having 3 different ways of installing software (modules/packages/flakes) does not feel better than apt install or pacman -Syu etc.

The best AI-detection tools are humans.

Everything else is terrible in comparison.

Consider all the gamers with more money than sense buying 4090s for the price of cars and, more importantly, many companies buying datacenter cards for their next generative AI project (not that I think many of them will last).

I don’t see Nvidia running out of money any time soon.

Even if it’s a re-run, it’s a dick move to give away the ending to any movie while in line to see it.

“He fishes in the lake” is a perfectly normal sentence.

Yeah, it’s the Start Menu in Windows 11 (though I think the same kind of thing will happen on Windows 10 too)

Calc.exe is a click or hotkey away.

The Start Menu is already there, no hotkey setup required. Plus, I can close it with a single key too. It’s simply more convenient.

I used to be in camp AVIF, but I’ve changed my tune to supporting JXL after running some of my own tests. The main things that caused me to change my mind were the better compression ratio, progressive loading, and lossless conversion from JPEG. Those last two in particular are very useful features which AVIF simply doesn’t have an answer to.

AVIF is a video format masquerading as an image format, and while that’s not a bad thing, it’s definitely not as good as a purpose-built image format.

It was pretty easy to spot in htop since it had really high CPU usage. Plus, the command line args it launched with included the word “Monero” multiple times, so that was a bit of a giveaway haha

This happened to me not long ago when I found a monero miner running on my laptop. Being a highly technical person, I feel unbounded shame.

Okay, but that doesn’t address any of the points I brought up.

You said to give Meta a chance. The rest of us are broadly gesturing at all the shit they’ve done in the past, and how we want as little to do with that as possible.

Innocent until proven otherwise.

Corporations like Meta have shown time and time again that they cannot be trusted to play nice with anyone else. Have we already forgotten about Cambridge Analytica or the plethora of other scandals they’ve been at the center of? The proof has been in plain view for a while now.