[object Object]

This is how you make your CISO cry.

The agency of just being able to fix something yourself is amazing.

Most of my open source contributions are bug fixes and reports. Can’t do that with closed source!

The short version is it makes your whole system deterministic and auditable, and that does some automatic stuff that is very nice.

Basically you write a configuration for your computer, then it generates atomic images from your config and manages your system for you. You update by generating then switching to the new snapshot. If anything goes wrong, you roll back, and your system is exactly as it was.

The whole system lives as code, it’s tied to git, and up to hardware specific things, I can checkout the exact same system across machines.

This is really great for people like me who dislike having to manage long term state like a grub config change or managing firewall rules or fiddling with committing systemd changes and managing them directly.

The packages are very well thought out.

For example if you add a systemd service it has rules for starting and stopping and the system is smart enough to know when to use them. That makes things like updating a server really nice, it’s just one command and everything is done for you, anything not affected by an update doesn’t restart, so services run smoothly (I have one config that manages all my services, their URL, firewall rules and healthcheck, and automatically adds them to a system monitoring dashboard for example).

As another example I can manage accounts on my system very easily, and I can clean them up by just removing that user from the nix files, and the system will do all the Linux user management stuff for me. This is great on a server where you want limited permissions users running specific applications — I just define what they should have and it works.

That has costs. Everything has to be thought of as either a system package or a user package, updating system packages is always a snapshot change with lock file update. You’re also locked into using nix packages which can lag releases (though this is most package managers).

Your average Arch Linux user probably doesn’t care or like this, they like the full control and flexibility Arch provides (which is just different tastes/philosophies).

You can install user local applications too outside of your main nix configuration (with something like homebrew, which works great on nix), or you can use home-manager to add more nix and manage your apps and generate user account dot files files.

You can also use nix-env to create reproducible software builds without containers, but I find it a little heavy to manage and haven’t learned it.

Ohh I have an old i9 intel MacBook I could migrate to do this…

Only had 512gb though, it’s an old dev machine.

How’s the Linux support on it? Since it’s all thunderbolt ports I’m wondering how well it works.

I really like nixos, which will not even tell you to reboot if the kernel is unchanged. Plus it will restart my services correctly when I update or pull new container images on my server.

It’s very very nice.

Maybe they should have the lower resource abusing version on all the time?

The only thing is this doesn’t yet do online user directories, local users only

Which is a big constraint right now

God is dead and we killed him.

Two of my favourite actors, I bet they’re chill in real life.

If I were doing this I’d be saying “what the fuck is StarWAEK?”

This is almost definitely intentional

I think they’re building hacking models for the US government and masking as this when caught.

Isn’t this their third attempt?

Honestly feels like the models have been getting steadily worse for a full year. Opus 3.5 was the last good Claude model.

Everything since then has been unable to communicate and is more and more designed to convince non technical users it’s right. All I want is a model that can do the small annoying things like run one off sql queries and tell me if I’ve made poor design choices and minor errors.

I compiled Linux last week and I don’t even know how it works

Thank you, I imagine it’s incredibly annoying when those break.

Snitches get stitches Potter.

later

I’m a “push buttons” computer nerd, not a “series of tubes” computer nerd

Why does this thing exist? What’s it for? Please treat me like one of the chimps from 2001 discovering the monolith, because that’s what the network is to me.

Also left one can fuck right off. Nobody tells me what I can’t unplug.

That’s fine because those vms are configured by and run on nix.

Yes