They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!

I do have several questions:

Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?

Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.

Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?

Exactly

To quote the post more specifically:

Even as our species destroys its only home, we assume that the solutions to climate change must lie in technology, without stopping to examine the role that this very attitude has played in the crisis.

This is so deeply ingrained in our social consciousness that, when there is a new impressive technology, we assume that it must be here to solve one of our big problems. As the AI hype quickens the pace of our ecological devastation, we’re so dazzled by the technology that there is actual debate in supposedly serious publications as to whether AI is going to save us from climate change, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.

Yep, it’s definitely better to have as a default

It is with zfs, but I not with regular mount I think (at least not by default). It might depend on the filesystem though.

You can also do the following to prevent unwanted writes when something is not mounted at /mnt/thatdrive:

# make sure it is not mounted, fails if not mounted which is fine
umount /mnt/thatdrive

# make sure the mountpoint exists
mkdir -p /mnt/thatdrive

# make the directory immutable, which disallows writing to it (i.e. creating files inside it)
chattr +i /mnt/thatdrive

# test write to unmounted dir (should fail)
touch /mnt/thatdrive/myfile

# remount the drive (assumes it’s already listed in fstab)
mount /mnt/thatdrive

# test write to mounted dir (should succeed)
touch /mnt/thatdrive/myfile

# cleanup
rm /mnt/thatdrive/myfile

From man 1 chattr:

A file with the ‘i’ attribute cannot be modified: it cannot be deleted or renamed, no link can be created to this file, most of the file’s metadata can not be modified, and the file can not be opened in write mode.
Only the superuser or a process possessing the CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE capability can set or clear this attribute.

I do this to prevent exactly the situation you’ve encountered. Hope this helps!

Then you might like this tech blog: https://theluddite.org/#!post/ai-hype

If you don’t want spellchecking, then no. You can just change the keyboard layout.

If you do want spellchecking then yes, you will need to install some kind of language pack.

I’m not sure how libreoffice does it, but Firefox has different language packs for translating the UI and for spellchecking.

Are the extra dialects taking up too much space for you?

You’re welcome!

I’m sorry that I don’t have any advice for a specific laptop, but it seems others are helping with that already.

More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

Have you even read my comment?

It’s probably best to limit yourself to a used laptop.

Reading and writing code is nothing more than reading and writing text, and for that you don’t need a fancy gpu or screen.

What I would recommend you look for in a laptop is

• an SSD instead of an HDD
• more cpu cores (at least 4 cores)
• more memory (RAM) (at least 8GB, preferably 16GB+)

More memory and cores will help you with compiling and running your code.

And make sure you take regular backups! You never know when your disk will fail.

Also make sure to check linux compatibility before you buy. Laptops used to be a pain (10+ years ago), and it’s gotten a lot better, but it’s not always perfect. Just search for “[brand] [model] linux” or try to find the model on the archlinux wiki.

nice make -j $(nproc)

Exactly, ansible is basically imperative, where write the steps declaratively.

Whereas nixos is more like a compiler that compiles to a working linux install.

If I added the software myprogram and a config file at /etc/myprogram.conf, that’s pretty easy in both. But if I needed to to then remove those it gets different .

With nixos it’s at easy as removing the two lines that add the program and the config file; after the next “compile”, the file is gone and myprogram is no longer available in the PATH.

With ansible you need to change the relevant step to use apt remove instead of apt install and to change the config file step in a step that removes the file.

Don’t get me wrong, ansible is still better than writing a lot of bash scripts, especially if you don’t have people with a lot of shell experience.

But tools like nixos and guix are on a whole other level.

How did you install nixos? The labels for disks and partitions are usually set during creation.

If the KDE-spin installer did not need to reformat the disks (i.e. the partition sizes and formats didn’t change) it probably didn’t touch the partition labels.

You can change the label if it bothers you, just make sure fstab doesn’t use the old label :)

Happy hopping!

because bash isn’t always in /usr/bin/bash.

On macOS the version on /usr/bin/bash is very old (bash 3 I think?), so many users install a newer version with homebrew which ends up in PATH, which /usr/bin/env looks at.

Protip: I start every bash script with the following two lines:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

set -e makes the script exit if any command (that’s not part of things line if-statements) exits with a non-zero exit code

set -u makes the script exit when it tries to use undefined variables

set -o pipefail will make the exit code of the pipeline have the rightmost non-zero exit status of the pipeline, instead of always the rightmost command.

Maybe your drive(s) fail and you want to reinstall. Then you already have a setup with all your software and config files installed. Just reinstall NixOS and re-apply your configuration (or build your own Install ISO ).
And if you ever get a new laptop/desktop/VM/VPS you can do the same.

Don’t forget to take backups, regardless of your setup tho.

The reproducibility also leads to some surprise features, like being able to wipe your entire system on every boot. Since NixOS always puts the necessary files in the correct place, this is perfectly fine. If you then add some mechanism to persist specific data across reboots (a separate partition, or the Impermanence module), you will remove all kinda of randomly accumulated files on every boot.

This means I have very small backups, because I have three kinds of data: stuff that is wiped on every boot, stuff that is persisted but not backed up (/nix/store, all kinds of caches) and stuff that is persisted and backed up (documents, repositories, media).

None of my OS’s files are in the backups, which makes of them a lot smaller than my previous arch install.

I’ve had a similar issue with a purple wash with HDR content; my TV wasn’t displaying it correctly but it was fine on my phone.

Unless you are transcoding a particular video, the server has nothing to do with it since it’s just sending the raw video stream.

On your PC the client probably uses the OS’s capabilities for decoding, so that depends on the hardware you have and the codecs that are installed. I can’t really help with that, but there’s gotta be more information out there.

Things to check:

• does this happen on all clients for the same video(s)? (Browsers/computers/phones/tvs)
• does this happen for all videos on the affected client(s)?

What color is the color wash?

Sounds like the video is using some kind of encoding that the client isn’t handling correctly.

You can also set up a wireguard VPN to run VNC over, that might be easier instead of using SSH tunnels.

Python development shouldn’t be that hard I think. You can just drop a shell.nix that imports your pyproject.toml and then you can run nix develop and have all your dependencies installed seamlessly with poetry2nix.

I’m using neovim so I can’t really help you with vscode, sorry.

Have you tried Erasing your darlings with NixOS?

The picture is LotR, yes. But the text underneath refers to WarGames.