That depends: In a certain way, we are already 4D creatures, with three spatial and one time dimension. However, in these contexts it‘s often useful to only refer to spatial dimensions. The 4D creature then has 4 spatial dimensions, and shares our time dimension.

But maybe its four spatial dimensions are our three spatial dimensions plus our time, and its time is something else completely? Then, by rotating you, it could place your head at a different time than your feet. But that also breaks causality and stuff.

Is this post about gastritis? What are we uniting about here?

Me pretending not to be looking for a place to vomit, just in case

Your wish can be arranged 🪄

— The mosquitoes

The connection to nature and the universe stops once mosquitoes enter the picture

I’ve also been distro-hopping, but settled on NixOS. I find it very clean, you know exactly where your (system-level) configuration files are (…and could even manage user-level config files using home-manager). There is a stable branch, which is, well, stable. And even if it wasn’t, you can rollback the system at any point, which is trivial (just select a different generation during boot).

One of the biggest advantages for me is universal reproducible working environments. Using Nix+direnv, I can lock all tools (make, gcc, JupyterLab, Python, Julia) that I’m using in a project to specific versions (and upgrade/rollback). I can install programs/libraries in a nix shell and they will be removed on the next garbage collection. Upgrades are extremely safe: I once had a problem with RAM that corrupted a lot of my files during an upgrade. Nix can detect and repair this.

Downside is that Nix doesn’t follow FHS, so some programs need a little help, for example by Nix’ steam-run.

On my NixOS, nix sets the environment variables XDG_DATA_DIRS, XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, etc. Maybe these contain what you‘re looking for? Do you have a path ~/.nix-profile/share/applications?