• 13 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • Some software is so complex and difficult that Debian does not maintain it on their own, and instead follows the upstream release cycle.

    Browsers are one such example, and as you’ve discovered for me, Thunderbird is probably another.

    Also, please do not recommend testing for daily usage. It does not receive critical security updates in a timely manner, including for things that would effect desktop users. Use stable, Sid, or another distro. Testing is for testing Debian ONLY, and by using Debian Testing, you are losing the advantage of immediate security fixes that come from literally any other distro.




  • I actually hate this take. Unlike facebook, on lemmy, you actually own your data. Will this ownership of data be enforced against LLM companies? Probably not. Stackoverflow had everything under a license that requires attribution, but LLM’s don’t attribute and got away scot free.

    But… the license that onlinepersona uses is less restrictive, rather than the default of an individual having absolute copyright over content they make. With onlinepersona’s comments, I know exactly what I can legally do with their comments.

    As for everybody’s else comments, like yours, I don’t really know. Can I quote you, with or with out attribution? Can I legally remix comments? Do I have to ask permission before I use your comment in my presentation? You didn’t sign any kind of license/agreement that explicitly stated what they can do with your comments, did you?

    I’m never gonna complain about someone explicitly releasing their work under a more free license. I find it frustrating that the fediverse is the “free culture” place and all that, but we don’t have a way to set copyright (or more likely, copyleft), on our comments. Instead, every comment is the equivalent of proprietary, source available software.

    People mad about onlinepersona’s CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, like the other poster who is calling them stupid, are literally mad about receiving free shit. Stay mad, I guess. Personally, I’m happy that I am given content under a more free license than proprietary.


  • Updates aren’t forced.

    No. Apple claims updates aren’t forced. With proprietary software, we have no way to verify if they have some way of forcing an update through.

    You have the ability to enable automatic updates, but they are turned off by default.

    No. Apple claims that only the user can enable automatic updates. With proprietary software, we have no way to verify if Apple can enable them remotely.

    Also, are you really going tell users to not update?

    They also cannot affect user data. iOS and app software is sandboxed. The kernel keeps application and OS layers independent, just like Linux.

    No. Apple claims that updates cannot affect user data. Again, with proprietary software, there is no way to truly verify.

    Apple users will experience the same thing that all other computer owners experience when they disable updates entirely; outdated security software and limited compatibility.

    Oh…so updates are good now, and we should update, even if it puts us at risk of something malicious?

    You are taking Apple’s claims as truth and pretending they are good. They probably aren’t.

    But, as someone else mentioned in the thread: The US government can force companies to spy for them. Even if Apple was as good as they market themselves to be, they cannot outrun the government.

    Now, it’s not realistic to force everybody to switch away from iPhones. But, we should stop treating proprietary software as truly trustworthy with our data.










  • Wish I could transcend into declarativity but the thread’s nix survivor ratio is grim

    Yeah lol.

    I will say, that for my server, I decided to use kubernetes + fluxcd for declaratively. My entire kubernetes “state” is declared in a git repo, and this is the popular, industry standard for things like this, called GitOps. It makes it very easy to add an app, since it’s just adding a folder + some new config files. And unlike Nix, Kubernetes and Flux are very well documented with much tooling as well. Nix doesn’t really have a working LSP or good code autocomplete, but with kubernetes, I can just start typing in a yaml file and then hit tab and it spits out the template for me. Code autocompletion with kubernetes feels much more similar to the tooling of other, more mature tooling

    It’s not as declarative as nix though. There are things missing, like OCI containers could theoretically shift if you don’t rely on hashes and some other nitpicks. But declarativity is a spectrum, and I feel like, outside of scientific scenarios (think simulations where versioning, hardware, runtime etc being the same is very important), I think many non-nixos solutions are declarative enough.


  • Advice online seemed like i needed to basically create a nix flake for the app. I still havent gotten it installed because i have no idea what nix flakes are.

    So, the problem is that flakes are technically an “experimental” feature, and thus are not allowed to be included as a primary solution in the official documentation. But, basically everybody uses flakes, so it leads to this crazy documentation split, and is a big part of why documentation on Nix is so part.

    Some stuff can only be done with flakes, some stuff only with non-flakes and you have to figure out which is which on your own, while also dealing with the poor documentation for either.

    The advice you received was wrong. You could also use a combination of a default.nix file and a shell.nix file to create a package and development environment for your app. But, the documentation is so poor that it’s unlikely you will learn this, and figuring out how to do this on your own, is again, a massive time sink.


  • So, I use Arch, but I don’t use the AUR at all. Instead, I use nixpkgs to get stuff (admittedly only like 3 packages) not in the Arch repos.

    The main reason for this is the quality of AUR packages. Although I don’t really fear a malicious package, I do remember hearing about a package that moved a users /bin to /opt during the install phase.

    Something like that is literally impossible with Nix, due to the way that applications aren’t really installed to the system. But, nixpkgs also requires some level of vetting the package quality, which is also nice.

    I also use nix for managing all my development environments. For example, my blog github repo, has a few nix files at it’s root, and you should just be able to type nix-shell in folder, and then you will get an identical environment to me.

    declarative rollbackable immutability sounds really freakin’ AWESOME

    I have BTRFS snapshots set up, and with grub-btrfs, I can even boot from them and revert to an older kernel (my /boot is stored on BTRFS).

    However, I have given up on NixOS, for many reasons. The documentation is very poor, and it’s more complexity than it’s worth, to make my whole OS reproducible, rather than just my development environments. In addition to that, their are also issues with running certain apps that expect to see a normal FIlesystem Hierarchy, which nix does not provide. Although you can work around this with stuff like steam-run or creating a fake FHS using nix, I would rather not play that game.

    But, considering I installed some stuff in an Ubuntu 22 distrobox recently, because that was what VScode and Unity official provide repos for, maybe this doesn’t really matter. You can probably use distrobox on Nixos, but I’ve seen issues about GPU acceleration with distrobox (and other non-nix apps) as well.

    EDIT: I lied, I use the chaotic aur for some things.





  • Yes. Firstly, it’s about release cycles. Centos Stream is a rolling release distro (although it rolls very, very slowly). But what this means, is that there isn’t a true guarantee of application/ABI/API compatibility between current versions of Centos Stream and future versions.

    In constrast to this, Centos 8 and previous were complete clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which was a stable release distro. During the 10 year lifecycle of each RHEL release, there was a guarantee certain application/ABI/API compatibility not changing, which is what stability in the Linux/software world is defined as.

    Centos 8 was a free alternative, for institutions unwilling, or unable to pay for RHEL stable releases. But, with the death of Centos, an alternative was needed. Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and Scientific Linux (designed for labs and universities), were rebuilds of RHEL. This meant that, they would take RHEL’s open source code, and recompile it and distribute it in a way that guaranteed application/ABI/API compatibility with RHEL, for the same lifecycle of a RHEL release.

    So Alma Linux and Rocky Linux fill that gap… but recently, RHEL said that they are adjusting policies to make it much harder for people to make rebuilds (likely targeting Oracle Linux, which is a RHEL rebuild), but this change may affect Alma and Rocky as well.

    Rocky said they were going to keep bug-for-bug compatibility, like they used to, but Alma says they are going to do something different. Although they still intend to be ABI compatible, Alma has decided to make some changes to the base system, such as reimplimenting and continuing to support things that Red Hat saw unfit to continue existing in RHEL. One example of this is SPICE, which is a graphics protocol used for low latency display of virtual machines. It had many usecases, and I am very excited to see it back in a distro in the Red Hat ecosystem.