I think Plato said philosophers like him should have power. Philosopher-Kings.

More of a Lenin vibe

You couldn’t be more wrong. 🍉🍉🍉

Of course, if you’re living in Russia, it’s dangerous to state anything other than support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t cringeworthy to watch someone awkwardly dance around it, trying to ignore it while complaining about (checks notes) losing a bit of reputation over an unnecessary war that their country started and which literally cost thousands of lives.

Any Russian who stands up against that is incredibly brave. The others, just different levels of sad. Non-Russians who support Putin are the worst.

I understand why you’d want FOSS to not care abot borders, wars and politics and that is noble. But to call this comment racism, comes across as a veiled show of support for Putin. As if critiquing his invasion is a racist act that hurts the Russian people. Putins invasion is hurting the Russian people. Not this comment.

Windows XP… such expressive, truly material-like, design, only Vista comes close. But XP ran so much better.

Yes, you are right.

The old stuff, now no longer supported, is:

• .NET Framework up to and incl version 4.8
• Runtimes distributed as part of Windows
• Mono is a Linux Runtime used for compatibility

The new stuff:

• .NET Core, up to and incl 3, more recent versions are named .NET from version 5 onwards (to prevent mixing it up with the old Framework)
• Is completely cross-platform, natively
• I don’t know about desktop specific graphical stuff but that probably depends on the specific library

Ah yeah that looks perfect, just get WayBlue Hyprland then! That sounds like exactly what you need.

No need to mess about with user services in systemd and display manager config.

NixOS

Alternatively (speculating here), you might be able to use Nix to install Hyprland onto an existing immutable distro like Silverblue.

Nix people please chime in!

I have never heard of WattOS but that sounds terrible.

It seems like antiX is a systemd-free Debian flavor.

If you want systemd, why not just use Debian? Or, if you are looking for a nice preconfigured DE/WM, any of a number of Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.

Mint for best out of the box setup, Pop!_OS for tiling, Zorin OS if you’re looking for a funky styling, any of the Ubuntu derivatives for the major DEs: Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.

Great post! Completely agree! I will add that for filling out PDF Forms, Okular is amazing!

chezmoi does basically that, without actually making your home dir a git repo, it just syncs it. It also supports templating and per-machine differences. Pretty cool really.

SMB is originally Windows tech. So it might not play nicely with file modes?

And since we’re on the topic, if we’re borrowing things from Android I would love to have the application sandboxing and permissions. I think they’d be a much bigger benefit – to all distros, immutable or not.

Flatpaks and Wayland should fill out this part nicely.

I’m guessing this refers to the not entirely separate groups of Nix(OS), Haskell, XMonad fans

Distro version of Firefox worked wonderfully for me on EndeavourOS (Arch repo / Wayland / Sway) and Pop!_OS 22.04 (Ubuntu base / X11 / GNOME)

Completely off topic, but: I’ve been trying Fedora (KDE spin) for a few months now, and I’m flabbergasted at how unusable the distro version (not the Flatpak) of Firefox is. I think it’s a codec issue as I’ve checked Firefox is running in wayland mode, but:

• video calls (Zoom, Slack) don’t work.
• despite installing every codec I could find through Fedy, a package manager for non-free Fedora repos.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Edge flatpak works flawlessly.

Are you using a flatpak browser too? If not, how did you get your browser to work?

I really like Fedora otherwise: up-to-date kernel and modern (very efficiently stored) packages, but properly tested with major releases, btrfs and systemd by default and commonality with RHEL is useful at work.

But these codec issues are pushing me back to Arch…

I um… didn’t get started yet. But a colleague demoed it to my and it’s kind of between virtual environments and containers, if you’re familiar with Python.

You write a Nix config and specify exactly which versions of which package you want to have. Reproducibility is the main selling point of Nix. Things don’t just break overnight because a dependency of a dependency of a dependency got upgraded. You can always go back to exactly what it was like before. Guaranteed. That’s pretty cool.

Ok so you got that config, then you build and activate it, and it replaces your shell. You enter the Nix shell. You still have access to all your files and directories, but your Nix config controls exactly which versions of your tools you have. gcc, npm, python, maven, whatever you use.

You can see why this makes people want to build an immutable OS.

The main drawback of Nix is that it has a bit of a learning curve. Hence why I haven’t started yet. Maybe it’s time though.

Don’t listen to him! Just start using Nix to manage dependencies and dev environments for your projects but keep your OS the same until you are really good at Nix

Exactly! If you only have to edit small text files on a server once in a blue moon, nano is much less biomemory-heavy. But if you regularly write docs and code in l vim or neovim, it starts to pay off after a week or two.

I really enjoyed learning to quickly select and change entire words or lines, doing things like: :%s/replace_this_text/with_that/g Etc. If you enjoy that, you will soon get to a point where you miss the motions in your regular editor and install a vim extension in VS Code and stuff, just before fully switching to neovim

Try running this: vimtutor

If you are already aware of hjkl, skip to the part where you learn motions:

/motion

Then look up surround (ysw is usually the command to surround a word, ys3w the next 3 words, etc)

It’s pretty neat.

Is compiling it yourself with the time and effort that it costs worth more than a few GB of disk space?

Then your disk is very expensive and your labor very cheap.