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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • This was refuted long ago. Systemd isn’t a single binary file doing everything, it’s a project that has many different binaries doing many different things. The only difference is that they are developed under one project to ensure they integrate well with each other. What your doing is like complaining that glibc tries to do everything, I mean it does open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread_create, crypt, login, exit and more… Xorg would be another example of a project that does many things instead of one very well.



  • No, that’s a very bad idea. BTRFS has deduplication, without that the snapshots would take up way to much space. Also it’s too many writes since ext4 doesn’t use cow and would have to do distinct writes for every snapshot.

    The 240 gb are plenty for a root system without /home and years worth of snapshots on a btrfs volume, only the changes take up space so the amount of snapshots hardly matters.

    For /home either ext4, xfs or btrfs is fine. Personally I only use a single btrfs volume and put certain folders in their own subvolumes so they can have different settings for snapshots(no snapshots for /home, tmp and cache folders).






  • Nope, it doesn’t. It always requires human assistance or random hardware failure. It’s either the user, the distro, package maintainer or upstream fucking up.

    Personally I blame half on users for picking the wrong distro(not suited for beginners) and half on the linux community giving poor advice(use the terminal). Not everyone has the time or inclination to become a power user and if people wouldn’t be so thickheaded and recommending the same problematic distros over and over to these people it wouldn’t be such a mess.

    I have a 80 year old neighbour whose old windows laptop was a mess and who was open to trying a new OS(because he couldn’t operate windows either anyway). I setup a MicroOS system for him, put a taskbar extension on it and showed him how to install software from gnome-software(which only has flatpaks). ZERO problems in half a year. He doesn’t have to do anything nor learn anything. He happily installed some card games, reads the few websites he follows and that’s it.


  • You don’t understand the problem. The problem isn’t what you eat, how long you shower or which products you buy. The problem is we are converting fossile fuels that have been removed from the carbon cycle into CO2 and releasing it into the atmosphere where it’s going to be part of the carbon cycle again while increasing the total size of available carbon.

    Now you may say “But if everyone does xy we release x% less carbon into the atmosphere!”, which is naive at best. A lower demand for fossile fuels does:

    a) not correlate with a reduced production of fossile fuels(as production quotas are set mainly with the relevant countries income needs in mind and many producers are afraid of lower future demand and are thus trying to sell their product now before it becomes worthless), lower prices might even mean higher production if the state needs a fixed amount of income.

    b) reduces the price, which in turn increases the demand again. To put it plainly, if all the people go together and restrict their use of carbon products as much as possible we might slash the oil price to a fraction of what it is right now which in turn would make it extremely attractive for third world countries to use fossile fuels to meet their energy demands.

    What’s the point if countries in the west use 10% less oil, the price goes down and people in Africa and Asia use 30% more oil because it’s more affordable now? The only thing that would truly help is a world wide oil and coal production quota that over time gets reduced to zero. As long as we keep burning oil and coal, at an increasing rate I might add, individual contributions are meaningless because we don’t truly affect the oil production, we affect the oil price, making it cheaper and everyone should understand that cheaper oil prices are not a good thing for the climate.


  • That’s a lie that got spread by the same companies that tried to convince us that cigarettes ain’t bad for you and fat is the problem instead of sugar regarding obesity.

    Climate change isn’t a linear process, it has so called tipping points and if those are reached shit happens. Consumer behaviour on that level doesn’t matter, it’s literally means we reach the tipping points a week later or something.

    This misinformation is made for only one purpose: To spread the blame. So the ones truly responsible can later say that we all failed together instead of being held responsible. The reality is that wether we successful combat climate change or not is up to probably a couple hundred people in leading positions in the world.

    If you want to see wether we make progress or not just take a look at the oil and coal production, every drop and rock of that eventually ends up in the atmosphere.


  • They are very very different, much more so than say arch and mint are different. Listing what makes nix better than mint would be just a list of features mint is missing, wether these are relevant for you or not would decide if they make nix better. However there are some objective technical points that are just flat out better:

    • One config file describing your system. You change that file, you change the system. The system always is in the state described in that file.

    • Complex system changes that would require many steps are trivial since you only have to describe the outcome in your configuration file instead of how to get there. For example I can declare in the config file that I want a system using the current stable linux kernel with zen patches and Nvidia drivers that have 32 bit support.

    • Every update is a (seamless) reinstall. The entire system gets rebuilt as if it was a fresh install, sans your home directory and the settings you made ofc.

    • Concept of generations. Every time I change my config file or rebuilt my system(update) it is a new generation with its own entry in the bootloader. Btw, the config file also controls which bootloader your system uses, you can just say grub or systemd and nix takes care of the rest.

    • ‘nix-shell -p program’ that little command will open a shell with the specified applications installed in it, after you close that shell the programs are gone. This is great for trying out apps without cluttering your system with their dependencies, or quickly using a app you know you won’t need permanently.

    • Choice between release based updates or bleeding edge rolling. Concept of generations does still apply, you can quickly try out the rolling release channel and if it doesn’t work out you can easily go back.

    • Trivial to change midstack applications. With midstack I mean things like cinnamon, gnome-shell or plasma base files. For example what if you wanted to switch from gnome to kde? A single word changed in the nix config file will rip out all of the gnome stack and put the plasma stack in instead. As if you never had gnome on your system, a reinstall for all intents and purposes. Again, trivial to change back.

    That’s just some of the advantages of nix.