Aaaand of course the first two repos on the Explore tab are NixOS-related

To also answer your question directly: yes, this was indeed one of two initial motivations for Nix!

Ok, so the systemd change was acceptable (since it was optional), this is absolutely not. Fuck this shit. If it’s coming to NixOS I’m going to do everything I can to stop it, and otherwise I’m keeping a Nixpkgs patch that reverts the commit

I don’t think the pen input sensitivity/features on it is suitable for pro-level artists, but I might be wrong.

I can’t remember the site, now, but I literally couldn’t log into one this week because the email never arrived.

Well, email allows you to solve that issue by self-hosting. But what you can’t solve is that if you do self-host, gmail will drop your emails to spam or just discard them completely, just because it feels like it, even if you do the whole dance with DMARC and have used the domain for a good few years. It’s frustrating as shit.

To be fair, LLMs can be quite useful tools to fill the gaps around traditional tooling for writing and coding. But I agree with you that they will never become AGI, just by their very design.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is already the case, depending on your definition of “code”. After all LLMs can spit out code-looking text at a rate much faster than any human. The problem comes when you actually try using this code for anything important, or worse still when you try to maintain it going forward. As such, most code in projects that actually matter will probably be either created, or at least architected and carefully guided by humans for quite some time still.

I think the meme is a cliche of “haha you are in a relationship so your partner takes up all your time and you don’t have any time for your hobbies”. Which sounds like a pretty toxic relationship tbh

I made a really cozy and usability-focused setup like 10 years ago, and since I made it with NixOS+home-manager I’m just carrying it over with me. It is going strong after three device swaps, two moves to a new country, and meeting a partner, with some minor changes (i3 -> sway, Nord theme -> custom base16-based, pulseaudio -> pipewire, etc)

I really hope “morging continvoucly” becomes a meme and is used to mock microsoft forever

you will get errors on your errors.

Python3: hold my beer

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Dolphin (well, whatever the KDE’s indexer is called) uses xattrs under the hood for tagging, so it will be compatible with other software (including {get,set}fattr).

The index has to be up-to-date, but then that would be true with any tag-based filesystem, it’s just happening on a different layer (and arguably a layer which is more suitable for this - not sure it’d be a good idea to enforce synchronous indexing during xattr writes).

The most significant user-facing obstacle is lack of software which supports this system, but I guess that shows that there’s not much desire for it in reality.

One that stops inviting ideological battles

That’s impossible IMHO. Nix is fundamentally about doing things “the right way”, and so there will always be disagreements about what “the right way” is. I think they are bound to be eventually settled on the best possible answer, you don’t need a fork for that.

The CSS thing might be true, but the swayconfig file is probably a solvable problem, especially with everything being slowly moving to freeform modules. We just need to write a Nix -> swayconfig generator, which shouldn’t be too difficult because swayconfig is not even turing-complete.

You don’t have to waste 30 seconds on a full eval when just iterating, I use these one-liners when trying to get some config file working: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/flake.nix#L140 ; they only evaluate one specific file and then link it into the right location “imperatively”

Then when I get it working I do the nixos-rebuild switch, which is a no-op in terms of home-manager stuff because the link points to the same location, it just makes it so that it stays the same after a reboot (I use impermanence).

I think what you’re looking for is simply an indexer + UI that sorts your filesystem by tags rather than by directory structure. Not sure if that’s as beneficial as you imagine it to be, but IIRC KDE allows you to do something like that in Dolphin.

They provide the same immutability guarantees

Not as easy to have your entire system introspectable, sharable between devices, and under the same VCS. NixOS is declarative first and foremost, and all other benefits fall out from that; immutability is just one of them.

NixOS is a hack that shoehorns existing FOSS software into what an OS should really be. I doubt we’ll get anything better for the foreseeable future, except maybe Guix.

Ah, it’s not the best for cases like that, especially if you need to make different layouts all the time. You can get it to do anything with enough packages and positioning hints, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore. If you just need a dozen of layouts and then fill them out with different content, it’s doable.

I haven’t seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, L^AT_EX for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.

So yeah, there’s no exact answer to “what happens to Linux after Torvalds”, it’s more of “who gets to add more maintainers to torvalds/linux.git if nobody merges things in there for 72 hours”. I suppose Linus is confident that the system of distributed maintainers is robust enough to survive his & gregkh’s incapacitation, and the only remaining point of failure is access to the central repo itself. I think he is underestimating the governance upheaval that would happen if he was to disappear, so I hope that he puts some more details about his views on future project governance in writing.