Yep, though the dpkg ecosystem also had more inertia than the rpm ecosystem did. Before Flatpak existed, pretty much everything that was packaged for Linux had a .deb file for it, but the same wasn’t true for rpm. So people who didn’t want to package shit themselves flocked to the Debian-based ecosystem. But these days we have Flatpaks and everything moved to the browser, so it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.
I put my tech illiterates on Fedora with GNOME without issue. If you’re the one doing the installation and can install the RPMFusion stuff like drivers and codecs then yeah it’s pretty smooth sailing.
Firefox has been great since Quantum released. They finally fixed the performance issues and it’s still more flexible in what it can do than the Chromium browsers.
It’ll probably be my favorite filesystem in 2030.
Now this looks like an interesting option. I’ll be checking it out over the next few days. Thanks!
I too have noticed a number of minor behavioral differences that I’ve found annoying, but it is what it is. This was the closest I could find to an active fork of Cantata, but nothing has been released at this time, though the dev has expressed interest in a Qt6 port.
If there’s any other Cantata enjoyers reading this thread while feeling sad that it’s not maintained anymore, Strawberry is the closest alternative.
Any organization that’s forced to pursue endless growth is going to end up enshittifying eventually, because there’s only so much innovation and wow factor that you can do to make a product appealing before you hit a talent/demographic/creativity limit. Not to mention that infrastructure and operating costs are massive when you hit that level of scaling and that needs to be funded somehow. Eventually they’ll be forced to start extracting more value out of their existing userbase to keep the revenue growth going. Going IPO is mostly just a telegraph for how things are going behind the scenes.
SimpleX was nice when I used it for small chats, but how is it with large groups? Matrix really drags ass with large rooms, even on native clients.
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture.
Something that has become very apparent to me over the past year of migrating away from the big 6 sites into the dark forest is that, no honestly, the internet isn’t that; the big 6 sites are that. Places like Neocities still exist and have lots of traffic and you can go there and have an interesting time. I’ve encountered more cultural diversity on the Fediverse than I had in the past decade of using Reddit. There’s still cool stuff and interesting communities; it’s just hard to find because search engines are increasingly useless. We need better discoverability; if we fix that, then we’re golden.
I don’t use LXQt itself, but its software suite is nice if you want a Qt desktop with a tiling window manager. Looking forward to it landing in my distro. 👍
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.
It’s a trade off that we’ll probably have to take unless we want to deanonymize the internet.
We’re probably lucky that AI spammers haven’t discovered the Fediverse yet, but if the Fediverse does actually become big enough for mainstream use, we’ll see Twitter level reaction spam in no time, and no amount of CAPTCHAs will be able to stop it.
I was thinking about this the other day. We might have to move to a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances at some point.
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.
There will probably be mounting pressure to deanonymize the internet, like with what we’re seeing via age verification legislation in various places.
Funnily enough, I was just talking about this with someone a few days ago. I’ve definitely retreated into my fair share of dark forests to escape the spam, bots, and astroturfing. I do wonder if the Fediverse gets popular enough, if we’ll have to retreat into a whitelist federation model with invite-only instances. It definitely feels like anything that’s open and accessible (and anonymous) is just asking to get turned into a steaming dumpsterfire at this point.
The BSDs got screwed over by a lawsuit in the 90s that made a lot of people hesitant to use them (coincidentally leading to the creation of the Linux kernel). Inertia carried it from there and Linux ended up getting more hardware and software support, which is the primary reason that people pick Linux over the BSDs now.