The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[prollyanotherlurker]

yeah like there are obviously huge benefits to using gpl, linux kernel's bazaar development and xorg not taking stallman's advice and suffering as a result are big ones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02_UeUnGQ

but it's not like we haven't seen this coming. i predicted this years and years ago with hostile forking, where a corp just commits so many changes to a project and forks it themselves, eventually placing the original maintainer downstream of their own project
this is a similar concept, but instead of just forking the project they replace the entire program and embrace extend extinguish
as an argument to why i said quality, the license argument would make sense if we were talking about macos, but adoption into linux means there are no licensing issues because linux distros already ship gpled software with no legal problems
unless there's something i'm not seeing about ubuntu needing to get rid of gpled software, i don't see how it's relevant

I'm worried about much further down the line.

As I see more of the old FreeSoftware and Open Source people start to die off or quit. And Like I mentioned, there are two sides that this could be used to subvert open source from. The corporations that would love to take control to make money. But also the types that want to force Ethical Software instead of foss. To me they are both damaging in similar ways Just different goals. In the future I hope at least the ethical source freaks will no longer even be relevant at least.

 

[acid_ra1n]

I'm worried about much further down the line.

As I see more of the old FreeSoftware and Open Source people start to die off or quit. And Like I mentioned, there are two sides that this could be used to subvert open source from. The corporations that would love to take control, to make money. But also the types that want to force Ethical Software, instead of foss. To me they are both damaging, in similar ways. Just different goals. In the future I hope at least the ethical source freaks will no longer even be relevant at least.

yeah ethical software would create issues for me.
the open source definition says very clearly, that your software must not discriminate.
the example they use is your software must be usable by an abortion activist and an anti abortion activist. and depending which side you're on you think one side is for human freedom and the other side isn't.
luckily i haven't seen many if any programs coming out that use the hippocratic license, so that shouldn't be an issue and hopefully they go away

 

[Hieronymus Lex]

ftfy

Yeah not exactly, at least with Arch and Gentoo, you can run most of your day-to-day software with relative ease if they could be built for Debian or RHEL or other "normie" distributions

With NixOS, if the software you want isn't specifically packaged for it, since all of the binaries are actually in Nix store and thus not FHS-compliant, some software that expect some libraries in a certain location in the filesystem would fail to work. Nix-ld worked most of the time, but not always.

The turboautistic part about NixOS is that trying to impose the declarative paradigm onto desktop usage means you're gonna spend about several hours in Nix's own domain-specific language instead of spending several minutes trying to accomplish the same thing imperatively with shell commands (which most Linux users probably are familiar with, and even if not, plenty of tutorials and documentations are available online), which is why I'm saying the kind of people who can put up with this and have enough free time to troubleshoot their system (again, as I've said before, more than your average Linux users) are trannies who like to play distro politics, start a coup, push for a CoC and kick out their own founder.

 

[acid_ra1n]

Yeah not exactly, at least with Arch and Gentoo, you can run most of your day-to-day software with relative ease if they could be built for Debian or RHEL or other "normie" distributions

The turboautistic part about NixOS is that trying to impose the declarative paradigm onto desktop usage means you're gonna spend about several hours in Nix's own domain-specific language instead of spending several minutes trying to accomplish the same thing

after using gentoo for a year or so i can't tell you how much of a relief it was to switch to an arch based distro
while nixos has you fighting shit docs and configuring workarounds for everything, gentoo has you fighting use flags and conflicts and at the end of it you have a pretty poorly patched system that kinda works but with breakages that were fixed on every other distro a while ago.
naturally, like nixos, gentoo breeds the most terminally online autists and so you start to see troons come out of the woodwork and take positions of power

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

That's the thing about these parasites. They say that about EVERYTHING. I found this video the other day, and posted it in another thread to sperg about it. It's some goth guy, that happens to be either some kind of libertarian, or maybe a republican. Some flavor of conservative. The thing that immediately came to mind watching it though, is what these troons, and faggots have done to he open source software communities. They came in, claimed that it was in fact political, and not actually about the software. Then they forced out everyone that had a problem with that, or made them afraid to say anything.

Any hobby, community, or subculture these people manager to worm their way into. Especially if they manage to get into some position of authority will in no time be deemed "inherently political". It doesn't matter if it makes sense, it doesn't matter if it even directly violates the principles of what that community is trying to do. They will force their agenda, because they are the "good guys" so if you don't agree with them that must mean you are a dangerous person who must be cast out, and never spoken of again.

This actually is a great explanation of what happens. I already knew that Marxist's subvert other groups, to take advantage of them. Usually if they are in some way marginalized. They coopt the group, and subvert them to fall into their ideology.

This video is probably one of the most concise explanations of it I've heard. Definitely worth a watch if you don't already know about the general strategy the communists use (they did the same thing going into the USSR during that revolution, usually using alcoholics, homeless people, and other less fortunate people to trick into following along).

Its just made it far enough along now in the west it's started to effect everything including software. (I'm the past 10 to 15 years I mean).

while nixos has you fighting shit docs and configuring workarounds for everything, gentoo has you fighting use flags and conflicts and at the end of it you have a pretty poorly patched system that kinda works but with breakages that were fixed on every other distro a while ago.

The only real struggle I had with Gentoo, was first going into it. After I had a firm grasp on what I was doing. I can't think of anything much different than arch I would run into.

The only difference, and this is something I learned early on. Is you absolutely have to consistently update. Because if you don't then you will likely have to do some manual intervention to deal with the outdated dependencies or use flag conflicts. Otherwise if you are updating anywhere between once a day to once a week you're generally good.

 

[acid_ra1n]

The only difference, and this is something I learned early on. Is you absolutely have to consistently update. Because if you don't then you will likely have to do some manual intervention to deal with the outdated dependencies or use flag conflicts. Otherwise if you are updating anywhere between once a day to once a week you're generally good.

i had run into that when i very first started but as time went on i started expanding my list of programs i was using or testing
once that happened i started running into bugged packages that were working on other distros but had critical bugs on gentoo

 

[Palmer Bangs]

The turboautistic part about NixOS is that trying to impose the declarative paradigm onto desktop usage means you're gonna spend about several hours in Nix's own domain-specific language instead of spending several minutes trying to accomplish the same thing imperatively with shell commands

I came to the same conclusion about NixOS. A few months back I tried it out, but any kind of "productivity gains" were overwhelmed by the learning curve and the gay language they made for it. You'll have much less of a headache just using a "normal" OS, and if something breaks you won't be bogged down by the limitations of the software.

 

[Ferryman]

Overall the documentation for NixOS is fucking garbage even Guix does have better one and theirs have half of the things missing from it and the half is outdated. Adding to that Nix lang is pure niggerware that needs to constantly defer to other languages such as bash to do anything.

Guix is legit a Gentoo-level IQ filter. The whole "declarative OS" thing is extremely easy to wrap your head around if you are an experienced Linux user. Even then, if you need more than max a week of daily driving to get the hang of it, I'm sorry, but the issue there is not in the OS, but between the chair and the screen.

I will never understand people in open source trying to cater to companies like Apple who are making who knows how much money. If apple doesn't want to touch anything with a gpl with a 10 foot pole. Good fuck them.

i just dont think gnu software is holy and if the license is a problem for people they should have the right to write their own and license it how they see fit, and if it gains traction in linux then that says more about the quality of gnu software and how people are being restricted by the gpl than anything

If you are not actively licensing your software in a manner that is hostile to corporate use, that is an active disservice FOSS as a whole. The GPL is ideal in this regard. I am a huge fan of both the MIT and BSD licenses as well, but from a wider point of view, there is absolutely merit to calling the latter a cuck license. Corporate or government entities will always strive to act in a manner that is most beneficial to them, and in this day and age, that almost always comes packed with disregard or overt hostility towards the end user. The way I see it, knowing that given a way a suit will always try to gyp you, you might as well pull the trigger first and force them into giving back by GPLing your software. Simple as.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

there is absolutely merit to calling the latter a cuck license

That. And also if you hear the people involved with projects like freebsd talk about licenses, and corporations using them. It makes me feel even stronger that the "cucked license" name is perfectly fitting. The way they tend to talk about companies taking advantage of open source literally just sounds like apathy.

And I would argue that we should look at it the opposite way. Over time FOSS has definitely grown. Corporations obviously dominated the tech world. Like Microsoft and apple. But thanks to people that have persisted, and not given up on the principles of free software. We have what we do today. If all of FOSS thought about it like the freebsd cucks do. I think it would be dead and gone by now. Or at least no where near where it is.

 

[Miller]

My schizo theory is they want to undermine the free software foundation replace everything with programs made by people that don't give a fuck about free software and permissive licenses. Then eventually allow Linux to be more taken over than it already is by corporate, and proprietary influences.

It's not a theory, it's called the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

The only real struggle I had with Gentoo, was first going into it. After I had a firm grasp on what I was doing. I can't think of anything much different than arch I would run into.

Gentoo has a reputation for being difficult, but the team has simplified the installation process significantly over the years with the introduction of a general binary host and arch-chroot with the install media. Additionally, they've added the ability to automate kernel installs and updates, which alleviates much of the maintenance "burden," if you could call it that.

One misconception about Gentoo is the belief that it is "minimalistic." It is not, as Portage relies heavily on udev, bash, and even coreutils to function properly. Furthermore, it installs libraries by default to compile packages. Some people install Gentoo with the wrong idea, thinking of it as a "suckless distro" rather than a meta one.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Gentoo has a reputation for being difficult, but the team has simplified the installation process significantly over the years with the introduction of a general binary host and arch-chroot with the install media. Additionally, they've added the ability to automate kernel installs and updates, which alleviates much of the maintenance "burden," if you could call it that.

One misconception about Gentoo is the belief that it is "minimalistic." It is not, as Portage relies heavily on udev, bash, and even coreutils to function properly. Furthermore, it installs libraries by default to compile packages. Some people install Gentoo with the wrong idea, thinking of it as a "suckless distro" rather than a meta one.

Yeah. I wouldn't exactly call it minimal. At least not any more minimal than arch. Compared to a "just werks" distro, I suppose it is though. That said, if you put a ton of effort into slimming everything down as much as possible you technically can get it pretty lean. Since will get a bit more choice, you can remove functionality you don't want in some cases, lowering the number of dependencies needed. You can run musl, and swap out your shell for busybox or something, maybe dash. Realistically doing that isn't actually worth the effort though.

It's definitely not the strong point of gentoo. I would say that easily managing packages from source, and a ton of configuration options. Also it's actually fairly easy to reproduce your setup on gentoo. It's something I don't see many people talk about. If you save your portage directory somewhere, and your world file. You can move it onto another machine, run

sudo emerge -auDU @world

And portage will build/install everything you want on your machine. Nix also does that, but it's way more effort than gentoo. Nix also goes way further than gentoo. Don't get me wrong nix has it's own benifits (like completely reproducable builds), but for most people Nix is more of a hinderance than a help.

It's not a theory, it's called the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

The theory part was more about how more gnu stuff keeps getting replaced with non gpl software specifically. Since at this point, it's something people can only theorize about. I know that companies definitely do the embrace extend extinguish thing.

 

[jONALD]

I have begun using WindowMaker, it was rather painless to get up and running and so far has been a sheer delight to use. The look is pleasing enough with the default themes. I may finally say goodby to XFCE. I finally get why some Linux users love window managers.

 

[Demonslayer1776]

sry for spam, i checked out omarchy and its a bit too buggy to daily drive rn.
very difficult to navigate compared to stock hyprland or pretty much any wm i've ever used. a lot of bindings are changed and programs preconfigured to act differently than they usually are, making for a very inconsistent desktop experience. no floating toggle by default was also a weird decision.
as i was typing my last post here my backspace key kept sticking due to some lag in the desktop, i guess something was hanging as this hasnt happened to me in years and a few keyboards ago.
hypridle is still a broken piece of shit and i wasn't able to fix it and had to reboot from a tty. ended up just commenting out anything to do with the lock screen.
after that though i had had it and just switched my boot order back to artix s6.
vaxry's code is still a pile of shit and omarchy makes it significantly worse.

I like Omarchy as a quick way to get arch going, but have to agree that isnt just not as good as doing a plain setup. I decided to try it recently and ultimately the defaults just didn't work well for my workflow, Im trying to decide if Ill do a clean install or just tweak settings within Omarchy.

DHH has done a pretty solid job on it but its still a power user experience, and if you dont have the same workflow it seems like you'd be better off doing most of the configuration yourself.

People who solely daily-drives NixOS probably doesn't do real work. If your work requires anything that is just slightly obscure or absolutely proprietary, prepare to spend hours on just installing it and getting to work properly.

You'd have to be a turboautist (more than your average Linux users) AND have enough free time (again, more than your average Linux users) to even consider daily-driving NixOS long term.

Im pretty sure most of the user base are devs. They have the most to gain from the utility of flakes, and nix's unique confifuratuon style is much more intuitive if you're a more mature programmer.

Proprietary software is a bitch, but does your average dev really need alot of proprietary tooling? Linux support is abyssmal for corposlop to begin with. Most of them are probably able to get their work done as long as they have access to vscode/neovim, git, and a browser. They'll also need the appropriate compiler or runtime for their language if choice, which tend to be very well supported under nix. I really dont think its that much worse in the grand scheme of things, and while it has some unique hurdles because it is different, it also bring unique value to the table that is valuable for specific workloads.

You're fighting against typical workflows if you use desktop Linux to begin with, is nix really that much more?

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

is nix really that much more

Depending on what it is. Yes. I would say it's a lot more.

Some cases, it might not matter at all. But when nix makes things harder. It makes them A LOT harder.

 

[WielkiWapiesz2137]

Guix is legit a Gentoo-level IQ filter. The whole "declarative OS" thing is extremely easy to wrap your head around if you are an experienced Linux user. Even then, if you need more than max a week of daily driving to get the hang of it, I'm sorry, but the issue there is not in the OS, but between the chair and the screen

The fact that you think so shows that you haven’t daily driven it at all. While the concept is easy to understand it doesn’t change the fact that their documentation is genuinely shit. For example there are services that aren’t described in it and the only way to know about it is using guix system search command and then to understand how to use it you need to read source code by using guix system edit. And when something is described there is significant chance that it is outdated(for example host-file) albeit thankfully Guix people aren’t retarded and you can still do things the old way with the only price being warnings.
The worst thing about it and infact the thing that made me stop daily driving it is however inherent to the design namely: Editing the system in manner unexpected by it’s designers is significantly harder than it is on normal mutable distro.

 

[Susanna]

I've been daily driving NixOS for years, and haven't had that many problems with it. Once your configuration is set up right, the system generally does just work. It's probably the only "advanced" distro I would trust enough to set up automatic updates on.
Some things are inherently problematic, like Python. Try as I might I just cannot get things like ComfyUI or OpenWebUI to work right directly under NixOS. But they run perfectly fine in docker, and really that's not a bad way to handle these things anyway. I usually have tonnes of problems getting Python stuff to run regardless of which distro I'm using, because Python ecosystem is pure cancer. The trick to getting a lot of things that just work on other distros to just work in NixOS as well is steam-run. It's a wrapper that fakes a standard Linux FHS for whichever binary you want. Similarly there's appimage-run, which does the same for appimages.

Is it the best distro and everyone should use it? Absolutely not. But in my experience it's just fine for a daily runner, and the special configuration system has a bunch of advantages that I really like.

 

[acid_ra1n]

might as well pull the trigger first and force them into giving back by GPLing your software. Simple as.

GPLing your software was fine in version 2 because corpos still had to give you source code back, but they had an incentive to use your software. People don't realize this but corpos make up the vast majority of kernel commits and they put serious Dev time into contributing to open source projects. Losing them is not a good thing no matter how you slice it.
GPL v3ing your software creates a situation where corpos have to write their own software and that puts you at risk of being replaced, which is what is people are kvetching over now
Once rust coreutils are a full replacement for gnutils and you can ship a non-gnu system without musl llvm, I will probably forever say the GPL v3 was the greatest mistake the FSF ever made, as it was probably the sole cause of gnu+Linux becoming linux

 

[Dread First]

On the subject of NixOS, I think it's theoretically sound software that got hijacked by ideologues. I've been considering using Guix SD for a while, primarily because I came across System Crafters and their Emacs From Scratch tutorial. I ultimately scrapped my scratch config altogether in favour of Doom Emacs. Still, I must say: the chap certainly has an aptitude for making complex software behemoths approachable and digestible without condescending to the user. He even has an entire playlist of Guix SD tutorials, should you want to get your hands dirty. He even created a relatively short yet compelling video explaining why he chooses to use Guix SD over NixOS.

His reasons, at a TLDW level, amount to these five points:

a) Guix SD utilises a proper programming language in Guile Scheme over NixOS and its in-house declarative language.

b) Guix SD pairs exceptionally well with Emacs. Considering how most of his videos feature him in front of a green screen while reading from Org presentations, this is essentially a given.

c) Guix SD has well-designed extensibility. Admittedly, this is the point I'm most hazy on because I'm a Linux Mint casual and not that deep in the weeds. Watch the video to learn more.

d) The Guix SD project is committed to the GNU Project and FSF's ideals of software freedom, even being listed as one of their few recommended distributions. That said, the community isn't puritanical to the point of impracticality, unlike other GNU-endorsed distributions. There are (categorically unofficial and community-maintained) non-free software channels that any user can utilise, should they choose to do so. I think Trisquel had something similar going on; to that effect, it's an Ubuntu clone, so no shit, it would have an easy way to bring non-free software back into the fold.

e) Relative to NixOS, Guix SD's development is highly community-driven, with developer discussions occurring on publicly visible mailing lists. Users are encouraged to contribute, even if it's just a hazy idea. The Guix SD development team is also highly sceptical of corporate contributions, so if you're looking for a Linux distribution that's by the people and meant exclusively for them, it's definitely worth considering.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

GPL v3ing your software creates a situation where corpos have to write their own software and that puts you at risk of being replaced, which is what is people are kvetching over now

As far as I know the main thing that caused controversy with the GPLv3 is the tevoization clause.



And I definitely get why RMS decided to do it. Maybe it overall wasn't the best move. But I understand it.