what keeps you using Nix or NixOS?

a sort of one-man network effect?

i wanted to load books onto my e-reader (runs NixOS) wirelessly: i already have a media server which i use for TV (Jellyfin). the e-reader speaks NFS, so i enabled NFS on my media server, added the auth to the e-reader’s Nix config, and since all my NixOS devices use the same repo for their config, my laptop and PC both get that NFS setup “for free”. incrementally, that makes everything else easier: i have a MAME arcade cabinet in the other room running Arch. if it had been running NixOS instead, suddenly that task of “load books onto my e-reader wirelessly” would have also solved the issue of “load games onto my MAME cabinet wirelessly”.

once you get going it’s just so easy to keep building incrementally. “tech debt” is a bit less of a thing than with other distros (still a thing, just smaller) because of determinism and nix flake check and so on. honestly once i care enough about not being able to load games onto that MAME cabinet easily, i’ll solve that by flashing it with Nix, and so grows my network effect.

you’re not gonna believe this, but i’m at exactly generation 1000 right now.

i use NixOS on my Pinephone daily, more as a PDA. it’s my primary device for music, audiobooks, podcasts, ebooks, RSS feeds and manga reading. i’m 50/50 for using it vs my iphone when it comes to IM (mostly Matrix), Lemmy, and maps.

there’s decently mature software for all of those applications (with a big asterisk for maps); i’m surprised that bluetooth is actually super usable (with Megi’s kernel, at least). but anything touching the modem is where the dragons lie. i’m trying to get GPS working, but having to actually read the Qualcomm manuals to get the details right. ModemManager is smart enough to initialize most of the modem — so that you can use the earpiece from any userspace application — but even if you plan to use it without a cell plan you still need a SIM card for it to not fail during initialization… it doesn’t have to be activated, but still a bizarre quirk.

anyways, NixOS will get you a working PDA if you’re a fluent user. to use it as a proper cellphone, that’s within sight if you’re dedicated but not something that you should expect to get working “in an afternoon”. btw postmarketOS is fantastic to use as a reference for how to wire all the parts together. the Nix User Repository has a few actively-deployed mobile configurations in there if you grep through it too.

sounds like one of the more battle-tested routes, yeah 👍️

I’m assuming by “working offline” you mean booting into a live USB

yeah, that’s one way. more generally, “offline” = any setup where the filesystem(s) you’re modifying to be impermanent isn’t critical to running whatever shell/session you’re using to do the work. that lets you do things in any order so long as the end state’s bootable, whereas moving /nix/store on a live system can totally just crash it and leave it unbootable if you’re not careful.

Also, is that what the Impermanence repository does on the nix-community?

default behavior for that impermanence repo is that persisted directories are mounted as bind mounts and persisted files are symlinks. that was chosen mostly to maximize out-of-the-box compatibility with most software out there, i believe. most people mount some fs to /nix during early boot, and place their persisted data in the persist/ subdirectory of that mount. but there’s a hundred different ways to do it: the other most common way is to use subvolumes and snapshots (btrfs, but maybe zfs can do it too?): / is one subvolume, and you take a snapshot where it’s empty; /nix is a subvolume where everything gets persisted. the Impermanence config that mounts stuff from /nix/persist into where you want it looks the same as it does with a tmpfs-on-root setup, and you get impermanence by just reverting / to that original snapshot on every boot.

i migrated from a stock nixos deployment to an amnesiac one, without creating a totally new filesystem/install (i.e. without “deleting my entire root”). right now you have a fs mounted to /. after impermanence, you’ll mount that fs to /nix and bind-mount things from /nix/persist back to parts of the rootfs. if you can access the fs offline, then you can move /nix/* up to the root of that fs, mount it at /nix instead of / during boot, and now your system’s amnesiac. all your old state will be in /nix/… instead of where anything might expect it. move that to /nix/persist, and then start adding impermanence entries for the state you want to persist.

you can actually do this online if you’re careful (cp /nix/* up to /, then edit the fileSystems entry so that your media is mounted at /nix, nixos-rebuild switch, cp again to make sure the new generation is in both places, reboot, delete the old store which should be visible at /nix/nix/store, then organize the persisted data as above).

safety tips are:

• don’t delete any files until you’re sure they’re not needed.
• if you’re okay working offline, then prefer mving stuff into where it’s supposed to be and just undoing that if it doesn’t boot.
• if you have to work online, then don’t move anything but copy it instead, and you’ll always be able to reboot into older, known-good generations (assuming /boot is on its own fs).
• take notes about where you mv stuff so that you know how to undo things if you go wrong.
• join us in the #impermanence:nixos.org Matrix channel if you’re not already there :)

not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this. in a healthy ecosystem we’d leverage more formal channels to help direct the development. if you haven’t already, it might be good to document the regressions and start/join the discussions on github or matrix (link for it can be found on the Lemmy github page). i’ve used these in the past for this project and the devs were reasonably quick to reply and apply fixes.

lemmy users

lusers

+1 for Darknet Diaries. got anything else to recommend in that nerdy/edgy genre of story telling?

• 99% Invisible (Roman Mars)
• Slate Star Codex (narrated form of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten column)
• Jack Rhysider - Darknet Diaries
• Maggie Killjoy - Cool people who did Cool Stuff
• Cory Doctorow’s podcast
• Jennifer Briney - Congressional Dish
• Lex Fridman

the first three are all tightly scripted storytelling: generally non-fiction, but exciting or interesting. sorted by general audience -> niche audience.

the next three edge into political territory, sorted from politically-adjacent to 100% political (not punditry):

• Maggie’s focuses on telling history. but she’s self-described anarchist and it bleeds.
• Cory’s is a narrated form of his blog. usually the overlap between tech & national policy.
• Congressional Dish is literally Jen watching hours of C-SPAN and reading 1000’s of pages of text from bills to give actual deep-dives into congressional happenings.

Lex Fridman is if Joe Rogan was hosted by someone who actually did his research upfront, planned out his questions, and chose guests that are less divisive, and more academic or entrepreneurial.

if you listen to any of these, please leave a recommendation for something similar you think i would like! ❤️

John Oliver hosts a political talkshow. that’s fine if you’re showing off a specific Lemmy instance or community, but if your goal is to show off Lemmy as a platform, doing so with that topic is a recipe for disaster.

yes! i landed on reddit twice during the last couple days that way.

• the NixOS sub wasn’t dark, but users were asking about that and some were dropping the lemmy link.
• the selfhosted sub (or one adjacent to it, don’t remember) was dark, and for this query i actually could not find the info i needed written anywhere else. that was a wakeup call.

few communities exist online in only one place anymore (for example, lemmy itself has a Matrix space, a #hashtag, etc). i think forums, IM, and the different kinds of (micro-)blogging coexist to encourage participants to balance length and substance/effort to different degrees in their discussions. IM favors short, distilled ideas; blogs favor lengthy in-depth things but don’t tend to encourage as much direct participation, and forums fill a middle ground.

but forums are also a victim of their own success: a highly active thread means you have to read for an hour before participating, or else you contribute something that’s already been said and you just add to the unwieldiness! tree-style comments really do let people selectively explore different, narrow slices of a topic without creating that mess. it’s not perfect, but if i’m forced to choose one or the other, it’s usually an easy call to make.

on the other hand, you could argue that some portion of “threads” in a chat app (particularly ones that live for more than a day) are really just watered down forums. so maybe we’re destined to recreate these things without realizing it, just in ways that borrow from all these different modes of communication in less rigid ways.

it’s not going to happen overnight. six months from now we’re not going to have 400M users like other big platforms, nor 40M, not even 4M. that’s not the timeline to expect here.

every corporate-controlled media platform starts out OK and over time becomes miserable. when that happens i leave. for reddit, that point was about a year ago for me. for you, maybe that point is still 5 years into the future. when i tried Mastodon in 2016, it didn’t work for me even as others were using it daily, but by 2022 it was better for me than whatever i’d used before.

more generally, i’m here on federated systems because i’m sick of investing too much of myself and my community into companies that literally do not care about me or the long-term health of these communities. it’s OK if Lemmy has its shortcomings, because it has the one thing that competitors cannot ever have: it’s operated (and sometimes developed) by the same communities that use it.

federation presents different UI patterns, as you point out, but it’s what makes the above possible. what allowed Reddit to ever be good? a huge part was the 3rd party apps, the community-developed moderator tools, etc. federation is important because it means these things can always exist. if Lemmy was somehow taken over by someone like spez, and they pushed for API fees, those operating the servers simply wouldn’t install the update. and if we grow this enough then as with Mastodon, we’ll have alternative server software (Pleroma, Misskey, etc) that means that something like the above wouldn’t even slow things down.

this is a place where communities that want to exist for the longterm can situate themselves. IMO that’s the #1 objective, and as long as we secure that then all the secondary objectives around user experience and so on will happen organically in time.

Repeat for specific hosts.

also don’t be afraid to do the same for specific users: if you see the same user in more than one of your communities, good chance they’re in some other communities up your alley too. i don’t think you can usually view another person’s subscriptions, but you can at least find adjacent communities they’ve posted in by viewing their profile.

the mobile UI is unusable. every page prompts me “do you want to view this in the browser or in the app?” (it doesn’t remember the way i’ve answered this question 100 times already). then if i want to view a thread that’s deeper than 2 replies, i have to keep clicking “load more comments”. it’s just annoying and slow, clearly by intent.

at cons: cosplay is a huge part of what separates the party cons from the sleepy cons. even if you just throw on a ready-made maid costume and nobody comments on it: in effect you’re saying “we welcome weird” everywhere you go and encouraging people to be themselves.

outside of cons: even better. i go out of my way to swing by the arcade every Halloween because i’m degenerate enough that i think it’s hilarious to see 30 y/o dudes with beards dressed up as Touhou characters playing dance games. but for real: be cosplay, do weird, whoever you are we love you for it.

i threw up a PR. take a look, give it a whirl if you like: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/232536

even with this upstream PR i deploy it with this two-line override. i’m suspect of a bug in upstream lemmy such that it expects to have superuser database access during the initial migrations – which that local override patches. it’d be super helpful to get confirmation from other users if this that patch is also in need of upstreaming or if it’s more due to my specific postgres configuration.

so the “obvious” thing that’s doable even when solo is just “hobbies”. music making, game making, pottery if you can get ahold of (someone with) a kiln, drawing, etc.

but on the non-creative side (because let’s be honest as a teen you’re often too mentally exhausted from school for those), hop on a bike, choose a direction, and find all the weird treasures on the outskirts of town. plenty of “weird things in the desert” and all that — but people take that trope too literally to notice that it’s really “weird things in the places people don’t frequent”: last week i stumbled across a few pallets of bees staged off a gravel road 5mi from my home. dunno if they’re being transported, brought in for pollination, or what, but it was a fun find all the same.

jailbreaking kitchen appliances, you say? (fiction)