I think NixOS is a superb choice if you have the time and energy to invest in it. I’m currently using Guix System (a GNU fork of Nix) and I’m very very happy with it. Previously I’ve been on openSUSE Tumbleweed because I thought the most important thing for me was btrfs with an easy snapshot system. But then, one day, when I was writing ansible playbooks to configure my OS I realized that what I care most about is declarative configurations. Now I’ve completely stopped using ansible for my laptop/desktop, and just rely upon native Guix configuration. I love it.

I do still run MicroOS on all of my servers because it “just works” and I think transactional systems are great for servers. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about trying out NixOS/Guix System as my server OS of choice, but we’ll see how that goes.

If you’re willing to put in the time, I think you’ll love NixOS.

Edit: Nix/Guix are also transactional.

Damn, would’ve been obvious from from the username and post history. If I’d bothered to look at that. Thanks for your comment.

Much of it might be freely available data, but there’s a huge difference between you accessing a website for data and an LLM doing the same thing. We’ve had bots scraping websites since the 90’s, it’s not a new thing. And since scraping bots have existed we’ve developed a standard on the web to deal with it, called “robots.txt”. A text file telling bots what they are allowed to do on websites and how they should behave.

LLM’s are notorious for disrespecting this, leading to situations where small companies and organisations will have their websites scraped so thoroughly and frequently that they can’t even stay online anymore, as well as skyrocketing their operational costs. In the last few years we’ve had to develop ways just to protect ourselves against this. See the “Anubis” project.

Hence, it’s much more important that LLM’s follow the rules than you and me doing so on an individual level.

It’s the difference between you killing a couple of bees in your home versus an industry specialising in exterminating bees at scale. The efficiency is a big factor.

IDK guys, do you think a web browser should be a “broader ecosystem of trusted software” or a web browser?

My absolute favourite thing about them is that they allow me to play games designed for mouse and keyboard from my bed! Like any old PC games (fallout, wasteland, baldurs gate, etc).

I don’t play enough “first person” games to have any valuable input, but when I’ve played things like Elder Scrolls I’ve honestly preferred using the track pads for controlling the camera.

Indeed. I very much liked the original steam controller in concept, but the execution left a lot to be desired. Like not using the most “plastic” feeling controller I’ve ever touched…

Yeah I love that I can play old PC games from my couch! I recently played through Fallout 1 (partly) on the Steam Deck. Amazing times.

I used to think XBox controllers were the best controllers on the market. I still think they’re very good. That changed when I held the Steam Deck for the first time. The feel is better overall, and in my opinion the track pads are such an obvious and great improvement on the traditional controller design.

Nowadays when I use other controllers, they just feel “bare bones” and like they’re missing something.

I definitely do not hate SELinux, I think it’s a great system. But my experience mostly (at home, anyway) comes from managing servers running Kubernetes clusters and, like, just using podman do deploy containers. In both these cases SELinux is a on “just works” basis, for the most part.

Then in enterprise environment that doesn’t run everything on containers, you usually have a very standardized way of applying SELinux policies. At my last place of work we did it via a rather Ansible role. It was simple and easy.

But I can imagine using SELinux at home, where you maybe don’t have these things, might be a rather “mysterious” experience. It’s not the most obvious system.

But learning to write your own policies (even if just trough se2allow or whatever it’s called) does de-mystify SELinix pretty quick.

If Fedora wants to promote FOSS then it would make sense to just have it’s users enable Flathub if they want to. Instead of outright promote a repository that promotes proprietary software.

If you meant it as moral question, then then answer would probably be that proprietary software does’nt guarantee the same user freedoms as free software. And thus does’nt let users control the software that runs on their own computers.

Oh yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for the info. I was under the impression that Flathub was a default flatpak repo in Fedora anyway.

But yes, always with these trade-offs. It’s bad when package maintainers package software, and it’s bad when software developers package software…

Why is Fedora packaging their own flatpak of OBS in the first place, when a seemingly working, official one is available on Flathub?

Great decision! Not only does this make Tumbleweed match MicroOS better, but also the RHEL-based distros. SELinux is not super obvious to use, of course, but I’ve never understood how AppArmor works.

I’ve completely switched from cron to systemd timers for everything. I feel like they are a lot easier to remember and keep track of! Plus, getting logs for free is pretty nice as well

Windows 11, and the group policies doesn’t allow us to use WSL. We also can’t directly SSH into any servers so we have to go trough a Citrix session to a Windows 10 “admin server” and then SSH or RDP to a Linux server. And Windows Terminal isn’t installed on the Windows 10 server, so it’s either CMD or the Powershell terminal.

It’s absolutely fucking miserable. I’m a Linux sysadmin who do a lot of automation (ansible etc) but also Python development. Try it yourselves and see how long you last! I’m jumping the fucking ship in a month though, thank the gods.

All the result of an over confident “security organization”, with a lot of hubris.

But the best part? It’s a $5000 work laptop, and my 6 year old Thinkpad (with Linux) runs laps around the thing any day of the week. Opening the file explorer takes, most of the time, 5+ seconds…

Fuck my life, and fuck this company.