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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2024

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  • “NixOS project” did not call anyone nazis, there was no “purge”, this article is clickbait and ragebait. What one contributor, however prolific, says, doesn’t represent the entire project (even though I somewhat agree with him here - there are sadly some bigots in the community).

    Nobody forced Eelco (the founder of Nix) to “abdicate”, but there was indeed pressure to step down as the de-facto BDFL put on him by various people. He’s respected as an engineer, architect, maintainer and mentor, but his community management skills were perceived to be lacking, and there were other perceived issues in the community - which boiled down to the fact that a lot of contributors didn’t feel like they could influence the direction of the project. Note that he’s not expelled from the project in any way, he’s still a maintainer of Nix itself, which AFAIU from my interactions with him is what interests him the most, and he’s more or less happy to leave administrative/community stuff to other people.

    Then began a process to establish a new governance structure. Currently, we’re up to a stage where there’s now formal community values and a new constitution for the project. There’s an election happening right now, with all active contributors able to become candidates or vote (although the deadline for candidate nominations has passed, so now we can only vote).





  • UNIX was kinda designed to be an IDE (of its time) by itself. Desktop/Server Linux (whether GNU or non-GNU) mostly continues this tradition; you are provided with some powerful tools for text manipulation, development, debugging and deployment out of the box in most distros. As such, any modern Linux distro is pretty good for development even out of the box. However, you must learn to use this power, and I’m not claiming it’s easy (I still regularly look up various manpages despite doing development on Linux for 10+ years in various forms).

    With that said, I myself prefer NixOS. It really feels more developer-oriented that other distros, as you get the power of Nix out of the box, and integrated into the system. With Nix you get easy access to the biggest software repository in the world. You get per-project development shells, so that you never have to worry about different toolchain versions for different projects, or your system being contaminated with bloat you no longer need. You get the power of reproducible packaging, to eliminate a lot of (but unfortunately not all of) “Works on my machine”-type of problems. It’s also got a hell of a learning curve, but I think it’s worth it.



  • Nah, cheap phones often have their bootloader unlocked/unlockable. Really happy with my POCO M5 running modified AOSP. Also, unlike every expensive phone nowadays, it has 3.5mm jack, SD card slot, and exceptional battery life for hiking/trekking (it survives 5-6 days as just a camera+map phone with all power saving on, in comparison people with flagships typically only last 2-3 days with the same usage and power-saving techniques).





  • I’m not sure you should “cheap out” on headphones per se. The really cheap ones are usually horrible, both in terms of sound quality, usability and comfort (well, except for wired Apple ones, allegedly, though they never fit me right). It’s just that it makes no sense to go for really expensive ones, unless you’re really into audio and love hearing the tiny sound reproduction differences between them, or enjoying the different tech etc. The middle ground of $50-$100 for in-ears and $100-300 for over-ears will often offer you good/great/excellent sound quality and the same usability&comfort as more expensive ones.


  • Hoe do you self host a nix package repo & install nix packages from 3rd party repos? Is this even possible.

    So, one aspect of this has already been answered by @Klaymore@sh.itjust.works . If you just want to package some stuff yourself, then do it (look at various NUR repositories for inspiration), put it in some git repo (or even a .tar.gz somewhere), and then fetch it from your NixOS config, either with flakes or þe olde way with let myPkgs = import (builtins.fetchGit { url = "https://..."; rev = ""; }) {}; in ....

    Another aspect would be providing a substituter/“binary cache” for your repository, so that its users wouldn’t need to build everything from source. This is a tad more complicated, as you have to set up some form of CI+CD, a place to host the cache, and your users would have to configure their systems to trust your build infrastructure.

    It’s all quite doable, and if you have some CI system&s3 bucket ready, boils down to nix copy $(nix build --print-out-paths) --to s3://your.hosting/your-cache with some authorization and error handling. There are also some readily available services that do it for you, like https://nixbuild.net, https://garnix.io, and https://cachix.io; however, be prepared to pay for the convenience.

    Then, on the user end, you’d have to add extra-substituters = https://your.hosting/your-cache; extra-trusted-public-keys = <...> to ~/.config/nix/nix.conf, and it should all mostly work.

    Examples of complex 3rd party repositories with a binary cache would be both aforementioned Chaotic and Nixified AI, and a more unusual haskell.nix.





  • telegram is not safe enough, but for some reason it is preferred by drug dealers. The lives of these people literally depend on the messenger.

    Most people are technically illiterate. On top of that, most criminals are idiots (otherwise they’d have calculated risk/reward ratio rather than only looking at the reward side of things). The reason it is used by drug dealers is (1) Telegram is convenient, (2) Telegram is not moderated so they accumulate there due to “moderation selection”, (3) Law enforcement didn’t care enough to do anything about that. Now that (3) has changed and (2) is on shaky grounds, I expect a lot of them will move elsewhere.