How exactly does Free, non-open-source software prevent that?

Pffft. You just aren’t a Nix enjoyer yet.

No problem. If you do decide to give NixOS a try, feel free to ask about anything should things be unclear :)

Yeah… I heard that too, about half a year after I got really into nix.

To be honest, I try to keep away from community drama as much as possible, so I am not entirely up to date here. I think (and I might be wrong, if someone reading this knows better, correct me!) there’s three main points of contention:

• Queer, PoC, and other “minority” users experienced harassment on (semi-)official channels (Github, Discord, Forums): That fucking sucks. I’m queer myself and lucky enough to not have experienced any of that in my time with Nix, but if I had not decided on Nix yet and learned about this before getting invested, it might have given me enough pause to not put any time into this. In all honesty however, that’s sadly a problem with many, many OSS projects.
• Governance and Funding: I do not know much about the governance, afaik there was a bit of drama about the inventor of Nix acting like a (benevolent?) dictator for life, but those issues should have been resolved with a new governance model. The really big, inciting incident of a lot of community drama with Nix through was a bit over a year ago, when the committee in question decided to let Anduril fund a NixCon, against the explicit and loud protests of the community. That sucked. Hard. While obviously all kind of shit companies use all sorts of great OSS projects, inviting Anduril to sponsor your official conference is… not really understandable.
• Conflicts of Interest: the aforementioned inventor of Nix owns a company heavily invested in the nix ecosystem. A bit reminiscent of the way that, say, Google holds Chromium by the balls, though to a much less severe extent. Miraculously, features that are “extremely unstable” in nix (but wanted by the community for a long time) suddenly get released in closed source to enterprise customers… However, the open source project is separate from, and not beholden to the whims of, said company.

My position on all three points is this: They are not great; but a) they do not threaten the ecosystem, which is mature and independent of this drama, and not reliant on one or a couple of central, potentially problematic, people; and b) there are community projects that actively and effectively do distance themselves from all of these points (namely: Lix) and which are drop-in replacements for the core nix language and compiler, meaning if the upstream project actively did something to really piss you of, you could move with very little work to something independent of Nix.

I hope this will not become necessary, because Nix is genuinely magic. Once you get the hang of it, nothing on your computer is particularly difficult anymore. You also get the best-in-class package management (and it’s easy! Once you have configured your own system to your liking, you already know everything you need to package your own software and contribute to nixpkgs!), being “bleeding edge” yet at the same time incredibly stable (seriously, I have switched all of my servers and VMs to Nix and I have not had one single incident once, including after updating machines after forgetting about them for 1.5+ years).

Anyways. Sorry for the wall of text lol.

As someone else has said: NixOS. You said in a comment that you use Arch because of the AUR. Good news, nixpkgs is larger and fresher than the AUR, without needing to tap into any kind of third-party/unofficial repo.

The unstable branch is essentially a rolling release (and very stable despite its name). I am happily gaming on it with Steam. During installation, you can just choose to not install a desktop. (However, due to how nix works, it’s trivial to rip out the entire DE at any point, should you so choose.)

But it is a learning curve for sure. Steep, but not very long.

Was gonna say. Nix matches all of OPs boxes.

Same

deleted by creator

Yes, in supported apps / protocols. Koreader, for example, should have 2-way sync for eBooks, and Mihon has 2-way sync for Manga.

+1 for kavita. It also has a nice webreader ui.

Well… In my case it would be “calculate how much loss you’ve been making by growing your own veggies!”, lol.

(Container gardening and watering add up, but I am not complaining, I am not doing this to save/earn money)

I was SO confused until I checked the community.

Thought this was about literal, real-world vegatable gardens as a hobby.

Haha, perfect 😄

Would you mind opening a PR to fix that typo? Would be useful for others as well!

Nice, that’s great to hear!

Ah, too bad! But thanks, that’s good to know.

Not gonna lie, I’m a tiny bit jealous of you 😄 It’s gotten to a point where having to use Android is a constant, low-intensity source of stress just because of how closed and privacy-unfriendly it has become.

Thanks, that is a very kind offer!

The secific app is xdrip+. But it’s probably not possible to test it out, because starting/working is not the issue, the issue is making sure that it has a 100%% stable background connection with my blood glucose sensor, recovers from failures, restarts in the background on closure,… Eventually, I’ll get my hands on a linux handheld and try for myself :)

That being said - how’s your experience with Sailfish been so far?

Ah, true. I honestly think we need to get to a point where smartphones intended for use with linux are profitable / widespread.

But that’s a catch 22 with UX and HW both being required for companies to invest in the other.

They don’t let you anymore, do they? There was a whole controversy about the Zenfone 12

Just waiting for the pain to be enough to switch to Linux on a phone.

Main drawbacks right now:

• I have one health-related (open source) app that I NEED to work flawlessly
• Navigating the various UIs seems incredibly awkward and inconsistent

Ah, nice. In that case just beware to move /var/lib/private/conduwuit to /var/lib/private/continuwuity, not /var/lib/conduwuit to its counterpart