🦊 OneRedFox 🦊

It’s because they’d have to install it to use it. I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME over a year ago and there hasn’t been a single Linux-related issue since. Most people use their computers as Facebook and YouTube machines and Linux doesn’t make that any harder than Windows/MacOS. It’s not like it’s 2010 where you’d need to install some desktop app that doesn’t have a Linux version and you’d have to fuck around with WINE, which was a massive pain in the ass and often buggy even if it did work. Now in 2024, those apps are in the browser (barring more niche use-cases) and we have access to Firefox and Chrome like everyone else. If Linux shipped on most pre-builts, then I think the average person would be fine.

Did you manually set the icon theme in qt5ct/qt6ct? I recall having to do that on a fresh install.

You just download and put the theme files where it tells you to (and in the qt6ct folder too) and set the theme (and icon theme) in the app. Icons breaking is interesting; I just installed Dolphin and it had no problem using my icon theme. Does PCManFM-Qt also have this issue for you?

Did qt5ct/qt6ct not work for you? There’s also Kvantum support.

But it’s getting so hard nowadays, and there are so many more important problems – global warming, AI, the inevitable collapse of the current world order… how does privacy improve the world? Please help remind me.

Privacy as a cause is something that helps support other forms of activism. We live in a world in which hostile state actors routinely surveil activists in order to more effectively divide, subvert, marginalize, and intimidate them; privacy is important counterplay against this. It’s like saying that you’re not going to eat healthy because exercising is more important; one facilitates the other.

I always forget that they added a graphical installer, but IMO it kinda defeats the point of having a declarative config file setup your system.

What issues are you having with Qt themes?

You should give the wiki instructions a read if you haven’t already.

Video hosting/streaming is the hardest use-case to replace due to infrastructure costs. PeerTube exists, which works like torrents and is probably the best solution that we’re gonna get for this. I don’t see it replacing YouTube though, since decentralization fundamentally limits reach (and potential income as a result) and a lack of data collection makes it harder to accurately profile viewers (both of which professional content creators care about). It’s probably fine for hobbyists and FOSS projects that want to distribute videos though.

While true, there is the nonguix repository that packages both the proprietary Nvidia driver and Steam. Otherwise, you’re probably better off going back to regular distributions based on the others that you’ve ruled out thus far.

GNU Guix is the only other one I know about besides the ones you listed.

Is the bootup/shutdown speed, and faster package management really worth it? Is it really significant enough?

No. The primary reasons why you’d want to use Void Linux are the musl packages, the easy packaging experience with XBPS, and the simplicity of Runit. The distro felt like BSD on Linux when I last used it (it’s admittedly been a few years since then); I liked it. If the above things interest you, then go for it; otherwise, stick with Fedora.

Sway doesn’t support the proprietary Nvidia driver and Nouveau was hot garbage last time I tried it. IIRC, GNOME and KDE are the two projects that have invested the most resources into accommodating Nvidia’s bullshit and even then I’d still expect the experience to be lackluster.

Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. It’s the spec for how the file directories should be set up on UNIX-like systems, like how typically user binaries would go in /usr/bin and libraries for those binaries would go in /usr/lib.

Installing proprietary software. For certain courses I unfortunately have to use software like Unreal Engine, Maya, Houdini, Unity, P4V, and a few others. I read NixOS has difficulty with running random binaries. I also could not find an UE5 package in nixpkgs, which Arch does have.

So NixOS is different from other distros in that it throws out the FHS so that it can do things like install multiple versions of the same library without issues; this breaks binaries, however, and they have to be patched to work with NixOS. So you basically have to package things for Nix for them to work. Certain programs like Steam and VSCode even have a wrapper as part of their setup that recreates the FHS to make them work as expected, so doing this is possible, but as a beginner I doubt you want to fuck with that.

Building binaries. I know nixos does some weird stuff with libraries and binaries. I need to be able to do normal stuff with binaries, and perhaps package and distribute them. It’d be really nice to be able to try out different compilers for my CMake/C++ projects also. Can NixOS do that easily?

It’s actually nice as a dev environment. You do have to write flakes for your projects, but that’s not a big deal and the reproducibility is nice.

VMs. I will be doing dGPU passthrough for testing assignments before handin. I assume this is no problem but it requires some weird stuff so I want to be sure before diving in!

I’ve used VMs without issue, so should be fine.

Since Nix is a distro-agnostic package manager, in your case I would probably use a normal distro like Ubuntu/Arch/Fedora and just use Nix with that if you want to go that route. It’ll go smoother than diving into the deep end right away.

What’s the Kepler support like at this time?

Ah good, I was wondering when this was going to release (April).

Pipewire was honestly the most pain-free introduction of a new audio technology on Linux; it was a nice change of pace.

NixOS.

I used to be constantly making tweaks to stuff and distrohopping like none other, but in 2018 I finally found THE setup and settled down. These days it’s all about having scripts that set things up exactly how I want them.

TIL. He’s a lot more recent than I thought.