Most people hate this. It’s just impossible for the average person to do anything about it because very few politicians support changing the current system. In the 2020 election for instance there were like 2 dem candidates and 0 Republican candidates who wanted a public option for health insurance. Nationalizing the whole thing, NHS style, is completely off the table.
The American economy is built in a very specific way to make certain things cheap and certain things very expensive. The cheap things are gas, toys, commodities, clothes, unhealthy food. The expensive things are education, good food, healthcare, and, in certain areas, housing. That means there are a ton of Americans who live extremely precarious lives, where losing their job would be the end, but they still have a higher level of material comfort than many people would in other countries.
The other thing about the American economy is that wealth is extremely biased towards older people. For a long time, the system was built around normal working class people buying a house, and building wealth through that. As long as housing prices went up at a controlled rate, everybody slowly got richer. Now, older people own most of the houses. Like I grew up in a small town that was sort of the ideal American dream neighborhood. There were a bunch of other kids on my street, including some good friends. We rode the bus together and spent the weekends hanging out in my friend’s loft. Now, when I go back there, there’s like one family with kids on the street, and everyone else is a retired couple in a huge house that they don’t really need. They have no particular incentive to move out, because it would be expensive and they’re comfortable.
So if you’re a younger person without in-demand education you really are extremely poor. 5k could really improve your quality of life by letting you get some dental work or something. Although the unemployment rate is low right now, companies are able to collude to some degree to keep entry level jobs precarious.
Obviously things are worse in red statea, but poverty is a constant in America. The only reason rich dem areas seem rich is because they force all the service economy workers who make their lattes and teach their kids to commute hours into work every day.
yeah if you’re using unstable than it’s rolling release and you just need to update regularly. the point releases shouldn’t matter too much
You need to update your inputs so that you’re using the 23.11 branch of nixpkgs instead of the old one. In my experience, a couple of things will break, but there’s usually warnings about it.
I miss the days when Linux was always distributed via torrent. This may be a blessing in disguise though, because the Cubans will get to use a nicer distro.
Very few people do, you probably don’t need to worry about it
Try using a different profile? (about:profile)
there a way to know what your systems current shortcuts are
Not really, besides just reading the manual. I think this is a problem for the Linux desktop actually. I would love a standard way (dbus API?) for the DE and various apps to declare their key shortcuts, and then I could view them in a pop up when I’m using the app.
Idk it took like 1000 years after the end of the Roman empire for Latin to stop being an important language in Europe. If the US vanished tomorrow (if only), im sure many countries would continue to use English for a long time because they’re too busy building a brighter future to learn Esperanto or whatever.
About Ansible, it’s not declarative in the same way Nix is. The way it actually works is it executes little Python programs based on your config. But if you stick to the high level modules, it has a declarative feel. Also, the Python aspect is useful because you can include bits of Python to manage things like generating complicated config files.
I haven’t checked out guix home, but it looks interesting. I have been doing some Lisp recently, so maybe the time is coming.
rootless containers
Are you managing dotfiles in rootless containers? IMO you shouldn’t install nix in a container. If you want to customize your container, run nix outside of the container and tell home manager to apply itself to the container’s file system (home-manager build will put the result into a result directory, which you can copy). Or, you could just mount your host ~/.config on the container maybe.
Ansible
Ansible is a big project, but at the end of the day it’s just a Python package. If you already have Python installed, it’s not really adding that much.
Also obligatory advice for anyone new to Nix: use flakes. Flakes are good and right. It sucks that Nix is in a confusing transition process to flakes, but if you just adopt them completely from the start it makes everything easier. Your home manager config can live in a single flake somewhere that you find convenient, and you can apply it from there.
I would use nix home manager for this. Home manager has basically three separate layers. The ability to install nix packages for a user, the ability to generate config files, and special modules that combine these things things as an easy way to manage popular programs (like vim or tmux or something). You could probably just stick to the config file generation (see the xdg.configFile module).
A big downside is that you will have to install the basic nix package manager to get home manager working. You don’t have to use it to install all of your software, but it will still need a /nix and a system daemon for home manager as far as I know.
nix doesn’t play well with container environments
I’m not sure what this means. What specific things are you trying to do with containers and nix?
If you don’t want to install a bug, complicated piece of software just to manage dotfiles, maybe you could consider Ansible? I know some sysadmin types who keep their local machine configs in Ansible. It has some nice bonus features, like deployment over ssh (nix can do this too btw).
I totally agree. The real problem for Linux gaming tho is that games are almost always distributed as compuled binaries, but Linux is built around open source. It you had a model where you paid for the source code of a game, and then it got compiled for your machine right when you downloaded, Linux gaming would probably work great. You’d have better fps too. (I actually really like this idea, somebody like GOG should make a client that does this).
As a big Linux fan, it makes me said that Wine needs to exist. But, maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Linux is just a kernel, with no associated libraries for app developers. App devs don’t want to manually write system calls, so it’s always been the case thar they lick and choose which set of libraries to target for their Linux apps. A popular low level choice is the GNU standard C library, and a popular high level choice is the GTK/GDK/Gnome stack. But these aren’t the only choices. I mean you can use the MUSL standard C library if you want. You can choose between OpenGL, Vulkan, and WGPU for graphics already.
I see Wine and Proton as just being another set of standard apis to target. Maybe they don’t have the best design, but is traditional Unix really the best design either? Now the Valve and company are supporting Wine, it’s one of the Linux targets with the most actual developers. And of course it has a huge advantage over the glibc + Vulkan stuff: it retains binary compatibility forever.
you’ll need a special Xorg implementation
Ok it’s true that op would need XWayland for some things, but that will be installed alongside the rest of the Wayland packages, and will run seamlessly.
Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation
This isn’t true. Some applications will use features that aren’t available in all Wayland compositors, but they are rare. The main offenders are apps that interact with other apps, apps that take screenshots or record, or apps that draw outside of a window (like docks).
This is not possible. A socks proxy forwards tcp connections over another TCP connection. A wireguard vpn sends encrypted generic IP packets over udp. A socks proxy can’t understand the types of things wireguard sends.
However, you could just install wireguard on both your vps and your phone, and you probably wouldn’t even need the proxy. If your VPS is hosted by a big public cloud provider, be aware that many sites restrict incoming traffic from known up ranges because public cloud vms often used by spammers.
asked if I knew anything about computers
lol you got profiled. nice that you could help her tho
Suburban car culture. People can go on and on about the how they like driving, and like the freedom to drive everywhere, even if it makes them fat and lonely. But what about their kids? It’s insane that kids are essentially trapped at home unless a parent happens to have the ability to drive that somewhere. Your convenient lifestyle comes at the cost of raising neurotic introverts who won’t go outside.
Huh, do you have any cultures in mind?