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.

If you supported the dev you’d pay to remove the ads. Clicking the ads would also support them.

It’s alright to like an app just because it’s familiar. I feel the same way with Boost.

Holy shit, Math Blaster 9-12. You just threw me back SO far. I just had a vivid image in my mind’s eye of the home office I played it in.

Thank you for the throwback.

You can code in Notepad in the same way you can eat off the floor with your hands. Using better tools is a nicer experience.

As for performance, when one of the world’s most popular editor runs on Electron, it’s not that hard to see why performance could be an issue when working on large projects on older hardware.
I’ve never personally had an issue with VSCode’s performance, but I’m also fortunate enough to be in a position where I can afford a relatively modern machine. Many others have to make do with what they have, which is why Zed might appeal to them.

I second this.

You’re using them exactly as intended, and that’s a good thing.

Being on benefits alone does not mean people dislike you. I think the way most people see it is that there are two groups: the people who try and get jobs and use benefits to live in the meantime, and the ones who intentionally coast by and live on the taxpayers money without ever intending to work honestly.

You are part of the former group. The good ones. So please don’t feel guilty for accepting help.

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.

Baby hurt me, more.

Same here, to a certain extent.

I was referring only to Linux’s lack of bullshittery in comparison to Windows, nothing else.

Far easier to do too. I did one of each last month and there’s no question that the Windows setup experience is terrible in comparison.

🧜‍♀️ Mermaid + 🔥 Fire = 🚨 Siren

Clever…

Perhaps try making a simple web chat application. I recommend it for a myriad of reasons:

• You’ll get to touch upon all the layers of a web app (DB/backend/frontend) in a manageably small way.
• You’ll be able to make multiple choices to learn different technologies - like which database type to use (SQL/document), which message passing method to use (requests/sockets), which frontend framework to use (Solid/Svelte/HTMX/etc), and so on.
• Getting a minimum working system is very fast. You can easily spend less than a day completing this, even as a novice.
• Once completed, there are many extra goals you can set yourself. Try adding roles, commands, enable sending pictures, embedding metadata for links, etc. You need only look to your favourite chat app for your next idea!

“Will ever finish”, not “has already finished”. It needs to predict.

It’s a reference to this.

It’s not even that. I can generally read a C-like language, but when the first line I see is a long-ass array of bytes with zero documentation it just makes me not want to even try.

While I agree with the premise of the article, the code is completely unreadable to me. I took a look at the first snippet and just thought “Nah.”

I used to only use C#, and I liked the simplicity of only using one symbol to access any prop/field/method. But now I’ve used Rust for a while I do prefer separating the two for the same reasons you mentioned.

So no, you’re not alone. Even cross-lang!

I’d happily pay a one-time fee to be able to use my own cloud service like Google Drive, OneDrive, or iCloud.

You can do that without paying. Obsidian vaults are just plaintext files on your disk. Just make a vault in your GDrive/OneDrive/iCloud sync folder and it’ll be synced.

There’s likely a extra hoop or two to jump through if you want mobile access, but it’s not too much extra effort.

Ah I was just referring to my laptop there. I do still use Android, but with LineageOS instead of my device’s stock image.

How am I the product when I bought it outright and installed Linux before ever booting it up?