I’ll be real with you. What you need to do is, whenever faced with a task that sounds like it needs CLI, go search stackoverflow for that task. It probably has something slightly relevant to what you need, you take the commands from that answer and read their manuals.

In the old days, your OS would come with a paper manual describing all the commands in great detail. Nowadays the OS is so complex that you can’t be expected (and don’t really need to) know all the commands that are there. But getting one of those old UNIX/early Linux manuals and reading through it would be a great start.

Joanna, fire.

Windows, starting with 8, is inherently hostile to its users in ways that are very difficult or impossible to mitigate. It’s a black box of complicated machinery, a lot of which is trying to spy on you, steal your data, show you ads, upsell you on their stupid cloud services so that they can steal more of your data, etc. At this point, disabling all of this is really difficult and unreliable.

Linux on the other hand is like a box of spare parts that you can build whatever you want from. You really do need to read the manual, or else whatever you build will look and work like shit. However, if you do build something good, it’s yours now in a way that a proprietary OS never will be.

What’s the mystery? There are a lot of companies producing various x86 and x86_64 CPUs. Intel and AMD are just the “cutting edge” in terms of performance, efficiency, etc. I have no doubt some of those companies may be using some extra opcodes for various specialized purposes. So why is this news at all? (honest question)

Defrag is a thing I haven’t thought about for like 10 years now. Is this really needed in the age of fast random-access SSDs and such?

I’ll just adb install those same apps from f-droid. But my hope is that I will be using mobile linux more and more as a daily-driver, until it eventually replaces Android 100%

It’s gonna be a bog-standard Android device with some software modified/removed.

Really? That would be heavily antithetical to everything they do. I expect it would be a Linux distro (like PostmarketOS) with some blobs removed etc.

I mean, it in a very literal way the parent project of GTK, and therefore indirectly responsible for GNOME, so that kind of checks out. I use it quite often though, and you can learn it to do what you wanna do.

Audio works for me (with pulseaudio). The camera doesn’t work for me either.

This seems like it’s mostly an extension similar to vimium, but you have to rebuild firefox to use it.

Edit: the build finished, typing from Glade. It is indeed mostly just an extension on top of firefox, but slightly better integrated, e.g. normal/insert modes in text areas work well. Doesn’t seem to work with EDITOR=hx (maybe it doesn’t know that it has to run it in terminal?). The integrated scripting engine is neat but I already have declaratively configured tampermonkey in my firefox. Oh, also, there are a couple bugs indeed.

For some reason I was expecting more, I don’t know what exactly.

As long as whatever software you’re using can handle a cache failure, I can’t see why not. I’d put my ~/.cache on there no problem.

I don’t think it’s much worse than what you have to do with pulseaudio, TBH. Here is my Haskell take on switching devices: https://github.com/balsoft/lambda-launcher/blob/master/src/LambdaLauncher/Plugins/Pulseaudio.hs, and Rust take on displaying device status changes as notifications: https://github.com/balsoft/simple-osd-daemons/blob/master/pulseaudio/src/main.rs .

Both are also long and hacky

Honestly, it’s mostly just trying shit out, breaking your install and fixing it, and having fun. In the grand scheme of things doing all that stuff is not that difficult, mostly tedious; my day job involves more complex and often interesting problems. It’s just gluing together things which other people wrote, looking at what breaks, and either fixing it properly or just hacking it together with perl.

Finally, I can confide to you that I’ve spent half a day getting wireguard working on that very phone a couple months ago, only to find out it was because I didn’t poke the right holes in the firewall :)

Yes, running OnePlus 6 with Mobile NixOS (actually mostly just NixOS with a couple modules from mobile NixOS). I will try to make the config public when I get it into a less rough state. It’s… useable as a daily phone, but you have to be really into it to do it.

It’s not like desktop Linux where if you’re a tech enthusiast you can ignore a few rough edges and just use it like you would a more mainstream OS.

I had to flash a specific old version of OxygenOS, using almost undocumented tools, which could easily brick the phone if something went wrong, just for GPS to work. I have to recompile my kernel every time it updates. I had to write my own scripts for the hardware slider thing to work (which has a nice benefit of letting me use it for whatever I want; I want to make it switch between NORMAL and INSERT in my editor just as a laugh).

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Rust is socially vaguely on the left/progressive side, yes. Not so much economically of course, because of all the corporate involvement.

GNU has some right-wing libertarian culture in it, but is also vaguely leftist and anti-corporate otherwise. I would actually say Rust is slightly more progressive than GNU on social issues, but not by much; and GNU is more anti-corporate, but also not by much.

I know there some other more certainly leftist FOSS projects out there (like the one we’re chatting on right now 😉) but overall Nix is pretty good on that front.

Well, yes, there are two separate contentious points.

The Anduril thing actually happened a month or so ago. I feel like this will be resolved at the next election, since tomberek’s term is ending and I don’t think he will be reelected, knowing how much most people in the community hate US MIC.

The moderation team independence is more complicated. It looks like the Steering Committee tried to remove a member from the moderation team, and also tried to push a new member onto it. I don’t know the exact details there. If we just read the constitution, the SC has that power, but the moderation team was very unhappy with what they see as meddling in their affairs for political reasons, and decided to quit out of protest. I feel like the new member was a right-wing (in the context of the kinda leftist Nix community anyway) political appointment (since the stated reason was “to balance things out politically” and the mod team was mostly leftist), but don’t know for sure and this is pure speculation. In any case, I think the moderation team is special and should not be under complete control of the SC (unlike purely technical teams). I don’t know how that would look like, and indeed as you say a restructuring is needed. Maybe the SC should only be able to veto people joining the team, but the candidates have to be chosen by the mod team themselves, and in order to disband the mod team the SC must disband themselves too. Otherwise the moderators will have no good way to moderate any discussion involving SC.

Unfortunately “direct suppliers of the arms industry” covers like half of the IT industry. I’ve also avoided such companies but it’s surprisingly common.

You have to look at the history of NixOS for it to make sense.

It started out small and there was a small group of people hacking away on a cool project in their free time. Of course they had shared interests and so would like to hang out together to discuss. That is how the community formed.

At first neither the community nor the distro were big, and so there wasn’t much tensions. When something needed to be done/paid for, some member of the community just took it up and did it, doocracy-style.

Then as time went on and both the software world and Nixpkgs got more complex, the resource usage got outside the realm of “some dude just runs a build box in their basement” and “some other dude hosts a binary cache on their Uni’s servers”. There were commercial players willing to donate money and resources, but that needed some management, both financially and logistically. This is how the Foundation was formed, at first just by the project’s founder and some trusted friends.

Simultaneously, as the community attracted more and more people, it started to feel less like a tight-knit group of friends and more like a town square: you know a couple folks well, kinda recognize most usernames, but can’t say you’re familiar with everyone. Some discussions got heated, and it became clear we would need moderation; that’s how the moderation team formed.

Another aspect of community growing was that you could no longer just host a meetup at a local cafe and needed a dedicated space and such for everyone to fit it. This is how NixCon started, and since it costs money to rent a space, there were calls for sponsorship.

At some point, Anduril (a US MIC company with suspiciously fascist-like opinions and tech) started using Nix. Since they wanted to hire Nix engineers and in general wanted to do have sway in the Nix community, they sponsored a conference. People really didn’t like that, there was a huge drama with open letters and maintainers leaving. The drama also uncovered some other rifts in the now quite massive community, e.g. contributors were unhappy with the direction Eelco (the project’s founder) was taking Nix itself, and how many PRs into Nix, including crucial bugfixes, remained unreviewed for months.

This prompted a bunch of relatively trusted people in the community coming together and drafting up the constitution, which formed a new formal, elected governance body for the community, the Steering Committee, who had the final authority to manage all aspects of community governance (except finances). After the first SC election things calmed down a bit. Eelco semi-voluntarily left the Foundation and most other positions of power, the Nix maintainer team grew and that helped a bit with PR reviews, etc.

But it seems now Anduril has hired a member of the SC (after they were elected), once again prompting people to be rightfully upset about them trying to insert themselves in the community. There’s also some mostly unrelated thing with SC trying to control the moderation team (the control which they do have according to constitution), to do some potentially shady things.

Hopefully this lets you see why NixOS needs a community, and community governance, in order for things to work at all. Someone has to host the binary cache, run the builders (which needs some entity to manage finances - the Foundation); review PRs (that needs discussions and those discussions need the moderation teem to keep them productive); and merge them (that needs committers, which requires deciding who’s trustworthy enough to do that).

And yes, you can just make PRs or send patches without community participation. Most folks in the community are both super nice and technically knowledgeable, regardless of their political stances. But the community has to be there. I really hope that both theses things get resolved during the next SC election (which is in a month or so).

If it’s rejected and enough other people are interested in the change, it can be forked.

And actually both the Nix project (as in, the codebase) and the community had seen multiple notable “forks” over the years: GNU Guix started out as a Nix fork, there’s also Tvix which is a Rust rewrite, Lix which is a code/community fork that happened after the first Anduril drama, etc. The latter two kind of rely on Nixpkgs and the associated build/cache infrastructure because maintaining that is expensive.