We should be looking at his given reasons, not making assumptions based on some ineffable set of considerations that he might have.
Christof’s given reason of complexity is sensible, it’s also one already considered when allowing R4L in the first place; adding rust language support has been deemed worth the additional complexity.
~/.config is probably a poor comparison on my part; it’s management is actually done by home-manager rather than Nixos proper, and I can’t think of another OS that fills this same role.
Nixos generates (for example) /etc/systemd/network to a path in /nix/store and symlinks it to it’s appropriate locations. After the files are generated the appropriate /nix/store paths are (re-mounted? Over-mounted? I’m not sure the implementation) made read-only (by default), but anything that isn’t generated is absolutely both mutable and untracked, and that “not tracking everything in /etc” is more what I’m going on about.
If you use Nixos as intended (when you find that a package is lacking a config option you want, create your own nix option internally) the distro is effectively immutable, but if you use Nixos for anything moderately complex that changes frequently e.g. a desktop os, you eventually run into the choice: become competent enough to basically be a nixpkgs contributor, or abandon absolute immutability.
I think the first option is worth it, and did go down that route, but it is unreasonable to expect the average Linux consumer to do so, and so something like fedora atomic is going to remain more “immutable” for them than nixos.
This need to git gud is thankfully lessening with every commit to nixpkgs, and most people can already get to most places without writing their own set of nix options or learning how to parse //random markup language// into nix, but you’ll eventually run into the barrier.
I’d argue it’s closer to a mutable distro than an immutable one.
Nixos tends to lean on the term reproducible instead of immutable, because you can have settings (e.g files in /etc & ~/.config) changed outside of nix’s purview, it just won’t be reproducible and may be overwritten by nix.
You can build an ‘immutable’ environment on nix, but rather than storing changes as transactions like rpm-ostree, it’ll modify path in /nix/store and symlink it. Sure, you can store the internal representation of those changes in a git repo, but that is not the same thing as the changes themselves; if the nixpkgs implementation of a config option changes, the translation on your machine does too.
Is that why they prevented it from being open sourced? I thought I read a while back that they just wanted to keep the code in-house.
It definitely has its roots in Debian, but when you need to use that weird closed source application for work, if it has a “supported” (for a given value of support) Linux distro it’ll be Ubuntu.
I personally prefer straight Debian myself, or something entirely different but when asked for a recommendation by friends it’s Ubuntu.
Cost to manufacture is not more than wages, but cost to purchase a good is always more than the total cost of labour needed to produce it, so long as profit exists.
The money isn’t free so much as redistributed from taxation elsewhere, think of it as the same as subsidising industry except only to the workers of that industry (instead giving it to owners and expecting the savings to trickle downwards). You could also consider it an income tax rebate with more fine-grained control of who gets it.
It doesn’t seem particularly ground-breaking of a concept; I see the value in investing money into necessary but unprofitable industry though my concern is that if you subsidise wages of a business with a profit incentive, management may lower wages to compensate.
I disagree about rejecting funding from intelligence agencies. I hate the concept of their existence, as well as what orgs like the CIA have done (and proceed to do) but given the fact of their existence, they do have legitimate reasons (in this case I mean reasons that align with Signal’s current goals rather than in order to change them) to fund Signal, and if that results in funding secure software, all the better.
I used ZFS with Arch for a while, the volume manager was what I’d call the largest benefit; in my opinion nothing else comes close to being as useful and well integrated.
I stopped because ZFS incompatibility with recent kernels (which I needed for GPU reasons) made me have to rescue my system more often than was ideal.
Some other minor downsides:
In addition to the downsides mentioned here about privacy regarding Google, there is a major upside to using this service: it offloads all of the authentication logic to google, so in theory it reduces your risk surface area, or it may be more accurate to say it concentrates your risk to your Google account.
You’d like to hope most websites use using common security best practices and keep on top of things but the amount of websites I had accounts on (on websites I had long forgotten) which have been pwned over the years tells me otherwise. Using google auth sets your account security to be exactly as secure as your Google account.
What you’re after, transparent wifi roaming, is actually mostly handled by the client; what you need is wifi access points that don’t get in the way.
I don’t have much experience with new OpenWRT supporting products, but the kicker is you only need one of them. If you have multiple routers, they will require some setup to play nice with each other. An “Access point” is just the wifi provider, can be hooked up to provide whatever the one router manages, and are generally cheaper than a router.
To that end, I’d suggest a single router, and multiple access points. I do this with Ubiquiti access points in my home, their PoE has been nice and they have been pretty “setup once and forget” for a few years now. I’m sure there are some other brands that’ll do well; Ruckus and Mikrotik come to mind.
Man if I was concerned about sinking the time to make a configuration for the compositor with a bus factor of 1 man-child, and a toxic community; I can’t imagine anybody investing the time to make a compositor is going to want to hitch themselves to that cart.
The compositor is really solid and makes for a great user experience but I’ll be fucked if every word vaxry writes doesn’t make me want to move to sway or niri.
Nixpkgs has more and newer packages than the aur.
The initial time to get shit done is longer; you can’t simply make install, but honestly you shouldn’t have been doing so on arch anyway.
Making your own derivation is much easier than making your own PKGBUILD and should be considered in those terms because you’re not just shoving some binary into /usr/bin for it to explode later when glibc updates.
When things fuck up, reverting to your previous config is at worst a reboot away.
I have much less time than I used to, so moving from arch to Nixos has prevented the time otherwise wasted in an arch-chroot trying to fix issues like the kernel upgrading past what the zfs-dkms supports.
If you’re using specialised proprietary tools, working them in with Nix can be an absolute nightmare, but I use a debian container for them.
While I think the cynicism is well-earned, we should pay attention to when we’re proven wrong and highlight when companies do something right. Bitwarden’s fuck-up gave them an opportunity to signal that they’re not intending to build a wall for their garden, and they took it.
Moving some packages (especially libraries) onto an unstable branch while keeping others back on a stable one. It probably won’t fuck you immediately, but when it does it’ll be a bastard to diagnose because you will have forgotten what you did.
My parents treated my device access something they had to keep a keen eye on. They were good at manually making sure I wasn’t sitting around having my brain rot, but their spying on what I was doing into my teens left me with some trust issues.
They briefly tried to use technological solutions to control my access and monitor me, but all that served was to make me very good at circumventing them. Outsourcing parenting to a computer program doesn’t work, and kids notice when you try.
They’re not trivializing, just noting that the different things you need to discuss for kernel development compared with other work. It is very different in a lot of ways, and does shape your perspective. I also find it interesting.
For the same reason spoken languages often have semantic structures that make a literal translation often cumbersome and incorrect, translating nontrivial code from one language into another without being a near expert in both langauges, as well as being an expert in the project in question, can lead to differences in behaviour varying from “it crashes and takes down the OS with it”, to “it performs worse”.
A rather overly simplistic view of filesystem design.
More complex data structures are harder to optimise for pretty much all operations, but I’d suggest the overwhelmingly most important metric for performance is development time.
Yes, but note that neither the Linux foundation nor OpenZFS are going to put themselves in legal risk on the word of a stack exchange comment, no matter who it’s from. Even if their legal teams all have no issue, Oracle has a reputation for being litigious and the fact that they haven’t resolved the issue once and for all despite the fact they could suggest they’re keeping the possibility of litigation in their back pocket (regardless of if such a case would have merit).
Canonical has said they don’t think there is an issue and put their money where their mouth was, but they are one of very few to do so.
Either Linus or Greg K-H, likely after feedback from many others.