James mentioned!

As a citizen of CA, we’ve got nothin but Ls here.

Jerma’s actual nightmare

deleted by creator

Oh huh. Thanks for letting me know! It might be my client I use Infinity for Lemmy. I’ll check my actual instance, and then see about opening an issue for Infinity if possible.

You have to be on the hexbear instance to see them btw.

It would happen on Reddit as well. Moderation is the answer. Just ignore it.

Thanks for reminding me I have this installed. I’ve spent all day playing this instead of doing my work.

My new background

I’m aware, but the appimage I run (Slippi Launcher) will run other appimages, and appimage-run can’t handle that, since it extracts the appimage, then runs the contents, but it won’t automatically do that for other appimages that are run.

Which is why I used a Distrobox and it was awesome, worked like a charm. I used Arch previously, and I just made an Arch distrobox and it worked perfectly.

Now I want to try this.

Sorry for the late reply. In the 2 weeks I’ve still kept using it and I learned a lot! But a lot of my musings still stand, at least in my mind, but after thinking a little longer, a lot of the thoughts I had also apply to other distros as well.

To answer what you asked in final, a good hypothetical that might answer it is something like GNOME. If the nixos channel blew up in a doomsday scenario, I’d be stuck maintaining my packages myself, right? And I use the doomsday scenario, because the problems here apply for self-made packages as well, but it’s easier for me and maybe others to wrap their head around the problem I’m getting at. So with GNOME, I’d have to update every single dependency manually in my nix files. With something like Arch/Alpine I could just have those files, and they have these really neat scripts where I can just bump the version, and it’ll download, set the hash up, and bump the version all for me. With Nix there are no such tools. I can’t just automate the process, nor is it feasible to do this type of thing manually. As new features are added, so are new options needed to activate those features. And yes, although in this scenario, I would probably just opt to not add these options and set it up myself, when making a package for the general public this isn’t the case. If GNOME adds a feature (idk why I picked GNOME I haven’t used it in like 5 years) to have extensions managed by the package manager, I’d have to add an option for what extensions are needed and all that. And this is a lot of work, at least as far as I know. The extensions would also have to be packaged.

Gotcha I’ll start playing around with derivations. I also just came to the realization that because of the magic of Nix, I can try these things, and if it breaks it, I can just roll back.

So I can use something like systemd.services to make my own services as well? Because I’ve been wondering how to do this as well.

Gotcha yeah that makes sense, so I’ll start doing this as well.

I didn’t know this before, but a lot of comments said the same! I think I’ll start doing this.

I use Distrobox with my NixOS machine for when I need AppImage support (or some random binary that isn’t equipped for Nix’s weird ass directory layout) and it’s amazing! Pretty much native speed, and when I’m done with it I can just wipe it out. Perfect!

I used Void for a while and I loved it! I had to move off because I kept having to make packages for the esoteric programs I kept using (cc65, Zoom, etc.). but I loved every bit of it. Even making the packages was pleasant, and it’s the first distro I ever contributed packages to.

Also, at the time I was using musl, and it was good, but not perfect. I’d recommend the glibc version for 0 headaches, but the musl version was very fun.

Ooh if you’re thinking of trying something new I recommend Alpine. An extremely underrated distro for a DIYer. It’s really lightweight and simple and its packaging system is a breeze to write packages for (for things you’d usually use the AUR for, since there isn’t an equivalant for Alpine AFAIK). Void is also fun I ran that for a year. Keep in mind, I’m only talking fun. For a good distro that will Just Work™, Alpine is fine, but I think Arch wins on that front.

NixOS is a journey and I have the privelage of having two systems, one “Home” system running Arch that I use usually and my “Roaming” system which I run whatever and is what I take to class and stuff because usually I only use it to take notes meaning minimum requirement is “Be able to log into a tty so I can write a text file”. So being able to use that for NixOS has helped a lot, since if something goes wrong, I can just ssh into my “Home” machine to get work done.

I could’ve worded the configuration part a bit better. My gripe wasn’t necessarily with that, but more with “If I ever had to make my own package from scratch including dependencies, this would be practically impossible” Nix’s derivations and other packaging information is crazy complex and keeping track of versioning, etc. is a nightmare. I think often about doomsday scenarios for systems. It happens, just look at CentOS and all that, so my main thing was if something like that happened, could I maintain the packages I use manually, and the answer was no. Of course I’m not in a doomsday situation, so I’m fine with it as it is. It’s just a thought I had, and that was my conclusion.