featured [he/him]

Professional audits happen for big projects, and hobbyists audit the programs they use frequently. In addition, some projects adhere to the reproducible builds guidelines, which ensures the packages you’re receiving are identical to the upstream repo. There’s more work to be done in formalizing and automating these processes but this isn’t a major issue by any means

You can use proton in an email client, but you have to install their bridge service first. This is the only way I use it personally

Well there are compatibility layers but they aren’t perfect. I’ve tried nix-ld, nix-alien, and nix-autobahn and each does work but not necessarily in all cases. I found this to be most common with scripts.

For example, I tried to install the discord mod Vencord using these solutions, but even with the compatibility shell I could not get past the first prompt.

Another issue I had was network authentication. An organization I’m in has a secure network requiring a web portal to sign in, and it uses a python script to get hardware details and install a certificate. This does not work even with FHS compatibility layers. I manually installed all of the python packages it wanted, which got it to launch and immediately crash. On traditional distros, it just works

I’m rambling but yes these tools exist and they may make everything rosy for you, but be aware of their own limitations because they didn’t solve much for me

I wanted to love nixos but it has many shortcomings that aren’t immediately obvious but can really stump you. No FHS compatibility seems fine but certain programs require it and don’t have nix native workarounds. Additionally, the documentation is really not good. I used it for a while but it got in the way too much; now I use a fedora variant and use regular Nix for dev packages using nix-direnv. Gives me the nix features while also having a fully compliant and functional base system

Mozilla.social no longer exists, Mozilla took it down

Recently, uBlue. It’s more a family of fedora atomic images but it has taken the pain out of immutability for me. I was using Fedora silver blue and later Sericea a while back, but installing codecs from RPMfusion on it never worked properly and my hw acceleration was always broken. I was on NixOS for a while but had sporadic problems that come with NixOS not using an FHS structure. But uBlue just works. Hardware acceleration works out of the box, and I can easily create custom images with BlueBuild. It’s a very nice ecosystem to create a stable, secure, complete base system. And I run nix on top of it for user packages and home-manager to get all the benefits of both worlds

Check out Wayblue, they make some custom universal blue images based off fedora silverblue which includes a hyprland image. I’m running a modified way blue image myself these days and loving it. Technically it’s a secureblue image based on a way blue image but yeah same difference

Was using NixOS but just could not deal with lack of FHS compatibility. Even the workarounds like nix-ld and nix-alien didn’t help with some key scripts I needed to run for secure network verification stuff. So I just migrated to this plus nix/home-manager for my application management

If it’s something that will be mostly interacted with over CLI then kebab case. If GUI then spaces

There is a fully Rust based Unix-like OS out there, it’s called Redox and it’s very cool

Have you tried yabai or amethyst? Both really solid macOS tilers

Extremely dependent on a number of factors, mostly hardware and configuration. I had a Thinkpad T480 and on a stock fedora install it definitely died faster than W10, but after setting up TLP and Powertop I squeezed ~2 more hours of use out of it than Windows could manage. Ditto for my framework 13, I get all day battery life on NixOS but when I’ve tested windows on it I lose a few hours immediately

What’s the name of that robot ipod dog I loved that thing

In other words use a UPS 👍

I’d recommend checking out Distrobox, which allows you to create containers of other Linux distros then export their applications as if they were native. Install a distrobox with one of the distros that this program works with, use the terminal to install the program within it, then if it isn’t immediately in your applications menu use the distrobox export feature to place it there.

You could also layer Nix onto your bazzite image and install it that way, but if you don’t know Nix it’ll be complicated

I started with TrueNAS and it works great. Either regular TrueNAS or TrueNAS scale will suit your needs well, the major difference being that Scale uses a Linux base instead of the FreeBSD of core

I use libvirt to do all my kvm/qemu stuff on my server. Using cockpit-machines web UI as a frontend. On my workstation if I ever need a VM I usually turn to Gnome Boxes for simplicity

ZFS for my server’s root pool and main storage pool. Ext4 with snapraid for my media pool. Currently btrfs on my desktop and ext4 under vanillaos on my laptop (not sure if I could partition it manually to use btrfs but I’m considering that for snapshots)

It’s the same thread, the linked post is down the thread a little bit

Play integrity api is implemented by some app developers to check OS integrity. Google blocks all third party OSes from utilizing this verification method, including GrapheneOS. This isn’t new, what’s new are the apps that utilize this integrity API which is where the story comes from. Most apps still work without it. Graphene has full support for hardware anttestation and they’re pushing for this to be the norm rather than relying on Google as the gatekeeper. I use graphene every day, and while I mostly use FOSS apps from other repos, the stuff I personally use from the play store works perfectly

I use ntfy on graphene and it works just fine. I had to fully disable battery optimizations but that was it