pukeko @ pukeko @lemm.ee

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Joined

2 yr. ago

It appears that it is. The first version, February-based, is 24.2. The next scheduled version is 24.8, scheduled for release in August.

If that’s the case, I’m less saucy, but my understanding was that the numbers were based on the release month. (Noting for emphasis that I cannot overstate the absolutely minimal nature of my irritation and that it doesn’t detract even a whisker from my appreciation of Libreoffice! It’s almost, but not quite, tongue in cheek.)

I’m still saucy (in magnitude, bechamel not mole) that the version numbering is yy.n (24.2) and not yy.nn (24.02). The actual versioning combines the “was there a version .1?” problem with a sorting issue if there’s both 24.2 and 24.10.

Obsidian, logseq, and others work natively with markdown files that are almost cross-compatible and can be edited and used in any text editor. Things like back linking may not be present in that case (of using a plain text editor) but it doesn’t disappear from the file.

Roam uses a proprietary format but exports to markdown.

That’s pretty much how I got where I am. Started with Fedora, then Silverblue, then Ublue, then fleek (a custom front end for Home Manager), then, when I saw what Home Manager and Nix could do, dove into NixOS fully.

First, I don't disagree with that, but I'm always conflicted. Like, eza is better than ls. Atuin is magic history search. btop/fish/helix etc. etc. etc. But for just getting started I almost want to discourage finding alternative tools. But I also don't lol.

Also, I am 99.9% certain this exchange is how most distros get started. "We can do a more sensible set of defaults!"

Day 1: Sway looks cool Day 11: SwayFX looks cooler Day 29: Hyprland looks wild Day 44: niri looks fun Day 63: This WM I found on a repo by a random Serbian guy looks great. Day 97: I WROTE MY OWN WAYLAND COMPOSITOR AND WINDOW MANAGEMENT CONCEPT FROM SCRATCH

I look back on learning to live with NixOS and laugh. It made my brain hurt, and if I'd only found the Misterio77 repo sooner, it would've saved a lot of premature aging. But, if you have some basic familiarity with programming concepts, it's an easy OS to live with, just different. And so, so, so, so powerful.

They do desperately need a set of opinionated example builds and much better documentation.

One of the more annoying things about living in Florida is that we have closely related animals that are nearly identical, but they don't have glow-butts. (At least not down in the bottom half of the state.)

I'll wait for someone from like Lakeland to say they have them.

Given the “unlearn what you have learned” problems I’ve encountered on my own Nix journey, I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened with shocking rapidity. Nix isn’t really THAT hard. It’s just (a) different and (b) obscurely documented.

My kid, believe it or not, uses a NixOS laptop regularly. He doesn't configure it yet, but honestly I'm not afraid of him having a go. When I was just about his age, I was figuring out DOS without the Internet to help, and while it was orders of a magnitude simpler, the documentation was orders of a magnitude more sparse too. Any of the big, well-documented distros (Ubuntu, Debian, NixOS (for some values of well-documented anyway), Fedora) would be fine. Honestly, I'd even let him loose with Arch at this point, or even Linux From Scratch.

Birds. Servers are big, strong, imposing birds. Mobile devices are small and flitting birds. Things in between are birds in between. I've put some thematic value on some of the bird names (a showy bird for media, etc.).

I had a thinkpad that got much of the way there. I never tried ZFS encryption, but I'm sure someone in the nixos world has figured that out.

I'm writing this from an M2 Air running NixOS via the Asahi bootloader installer and it's an absolute delight. There are a few missing packages for the architecture, but surprisingly few. Everything works fine, except the fingerprint reader. (Having said all that, I like macos just fine.)

Love this. It's related to one of the reasons I have recommended NixOS more often than I would have expected (not, however, as often as Fedora, Mint, etc.): if you're heading into a new way of using a computer anyway, why not go with something that forces you to abandon assumptions and learn something truly new? With the side benefit of effortless rollbacks if something you fiddle with goes horribly wrong. :)

But, no, at risk of violating rule #1 in your post, just pick a distro, don't worry too much about which, pick a desktop environment, don't worry about which, use the machine, and if you have a negative experience only then remember that you can try another desktop environment, distro, etc. Eventually you'll get to a distrohopping phase, but until then it's just software and a computer is just a tool.

Darktable has an astonishingly odd UI. It's a very, very powerful piece of software, but the workflow and assumptions are unlike any other software tool I've used. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you're looking to make a few luminosity adjustments as in Lightroom, it's going to feel alien. RawTherapee isn't, I suppose, as powerful at the top end, but it's much more accessible initially.

You might also want to look at Rapid Photo Downloader for easy and consistent photo importing to the filesystem.

My kid (not even a teenager) uses Linux daily. And not in a coy "he's using a chromebook" way. He's using full-blown NixOS on a laptop I set up for him. Could he have set it up? No, but he's a child. Has day to day use presented him with any difficulties whatsoever? Nope. He figured out gnome purely by instinct in a day. He goes between macos and windows and linux effortlessly, because he's a reasonably intelligent human being.

But, yes, half the time the "linux is hard" crowd seem to be basing their evaluation on things you would rarely do on a mac or windows machine. These days, install Mint, Fedora, or, hell, even Nixos or Endeavor, choose the defaults, and you will very likely have a perfectly usable, intuitive system.

The real thing. https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon/

I wouldn't say it's something anyone can do (no graphical installer and updating is a bit manual) and it's all dependent on the Asahi folks, bless them, but it took me about 20 minutes, other than whipping up a machine-specific configuration.nix and home.nix (about 20 more minutes on either side of the installation). All of the instructions were clear, though I will warn that some of them are not well presented in that there are instructions that should be bullet points that are stuffed into paragraphs. Nothing remotely exotic though--that's all in the Asahi stuff that is wonderfully hidden from the view.

A last generation ThinkPad is still going to be a beast you can get 6-7 years out of. I have a gen2 X1 that was still a beast until the offspring spilled a Coke on it.