2xsaiko

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

I use distro packages. In the rare case something isn’t packaged yet, I package it myself. And for the isolation, systemd services can do most of the things docker can if you need (check systemd-analyze security).

For just hosting services that can be done instead with normal system services, docker makes your setup a lot more complex (especially on the networking side), for little if any gain. Unless I need to spin up something multiple times temporarily on demand or something has a hard dependency on it, I’m not going to bother with it anymore.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

“average person has 109 devices” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person has 40 devices. Computers Georg, who lives in cave & has 10,000, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

Fastmail looks like they have CalDAV and CardDAV support (fastmail.help/…/1500000278342-Server-names-and-po…). If you actually want to use their contacts and calendar, why do you want to host another yourself? Two-way sync sounds like a pain.

You just need to connect your devices to it. Unfortunately Google thinks PIM sync is not worthwhile to have on Android unless you use their service, so you’ll need some extra apps. I used DAVx5 (it’s free if you get it from F-Droid), Tasks.org and OneCalendar in the past for this.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

Right, exactly.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

All of this is pointless until they stop requiring “notarization”.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

tunnelbroker.net since I don’t have static IPv6 currently. Otherwise, that.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

photorec/testdisk

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

I tried Gnome with Wayland and an Nvidia card just yesterday, it worked fine so far with the proprietary drivers. NixOS not Fedora though.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

macOS has both, a system wide /Applications and per-user ~/Applications. Not to mention that it doesn’t really matter on a single user system anyway.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

The wallet needs to be named “kdewallet” and the password needs to be the same as your login password for it to automatically unlock.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

MMS is still 0.37€ for me right now (SMS is free though). Completely unacceptable.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

Literally just scroll all the way to the right on the home screen, there’s your category/alphabetical app list.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

Who wants to be the next one to try making “full self driving” cars and waste billions of dollars doing so instead of investing into public transport which would also make driving more safe and more enjoyable because fewer cars would be on the road?

IMO self driving cars are the epitome of Silicon Valley techbro overly complex “solutions” which look awesome and sci-fi but could only ever solve part of the problem if they became a reality.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

Really? JetBrains Rider is great IMO. Though you do have to pay for it.

2xsaiko , 3 months ago

True, I think hot reload is the one big thing it’s lacking.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

PeerTube can do this (yes, out of the box!).

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

docs.joinpeertube.org/use/channel-sync

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

You don’t have to lock it up right away. In Germany, at least the school I went to, we’re allowed to have them on us, they have to stay in the pocket or bag and should at least be in do not disturb or silent mode. Otherwise, only then teachers take it away and you have to retrieve it from the admin office when you leave. (It’s more relaxed too in the last two years when you’re around 18, I’m pretty sure in a lot of classes I just had it on the desk when teachers didn’t mind. It still had to not cause distractions though.)

Generally this worked well (though, I left our equivalent of high school in 2019, no idea how it is now), except in some classes with oblivious teachers. But I feel like in those cases, you can make all the laws you want and it won’t fix shit.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Yeah, I feel like the only way it would be useful is in the very unlikely event you somehow get cut off from everyone else. Parents likely can’t do anything useful until the emergency is over anyway and I don’t know who else you would call that the school wouldn’t already have called.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Teachers increasingly don’t have the authority or ability to enforce them when they’re broken.

Well, I feel like this is the main problem then. If teachers aren’t allowed to enforce any rules, what are we even talking about here. Especially kids will do anything they can get away with. (I certainly did my fair share of shenanigans too.)

The policy only works when the majority of people willingly comply, just like nearly all of the other rules / policies / laws that society creates.

So what does a Teacher do when 15 of their 20 students have their phones out and are using them in class?

Really? I think this is very different since it’s in a controlled environment with a relatively small group of people. Or at least, it should be. The teacher should very reasonably be able to take all of those away. And if not, here they certainly had the ability to escalate.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

With a bit of fiddling (i.e. installing the Windows version of Steam with Wine). I think they’re all still 32-bit and Apple has dropped 32-bit support in recent macOS releases. Maybe that’ll change since they’re making a 64-bit Linux version of Team Fortress 2, but I won’t hold too much hope.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Factorio is great if that’s your kind of game.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

You do that regardless of which app you use to send SMS.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Cool, but that’s not an argument against SMS support in Signal.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

“You can also see it in the new parent (maternity/paternity leave) policies. Male employees can come back to do the same job again, whereas female employees are guaranteed a job when they return, but there is no guarantee it will be the same one they had when they left.”

wtf?

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

I’m currently playing The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow. Very good so far.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Woke up with vertigo. Had to basically lay there with my eyes closed not moving for probably 10 minutes because every tiny movement felt like I was gonna throw up.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

I’d really like to experience this at some point because I can’t imagine what it’s like at all.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

yeah. usability > UX

2xsaiko , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

For nixpkgs, whike I’m sure I can get a package from the sounds of the sizes the package covers only the application or the library, meaning I still need the dependencies.

When you download/build a nix package, nix will absolutely also download all necessary dependencies.

So what exactly would make me the user trade my built in tools (apt/pacman/dnf) for nix?

Getting a shell with a specific package as a one off. Want ffmpeg? nix-shell -p ffmpeg opens a shell with ffmpeg in its path, and only that shell has it.

Along with that, that means users can install packages for themselves. Limited use for single-user systems, but nonetheless it’s possible.

Per-project dependencies. Pretty much the same as above, but the dependencies are declared in a file which is part of the project. In many cases that same file can also be used as a nix package itself, like any other in nixpkgs. Very useful if you write software yourself. Here’s an example.

Being a source-based package manager with a cache means that you get all the benefits of prebuilt packages but can easily patch or use other versions of a package, with no difference in use (other than that it will build it locally instead of downloading from the cache).

On a distro with a different main package manager I would probably mainly use it for per-project dependencies though.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Inate complexity that keeps moving as they introduce things like flakes.

Flakes solve the problem of reproducibility for which nixpkgs (or other external input) revision to use (e.g. in a software project). The main thing they bring is a npm-like lock file and a predictable interface. You don’t have to use them if you don’t want that.

Its a declarative configuration management system as package manager.

No it isn’t. That’s NixOS, which is another thing built on top of Nix and nixpkgs. nixpkgs is first and foremost a package collection.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Nix is 7 years older than npm :P

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

For development, yeah you’re supposed to use it like that, as opposed to installing dependencies systemwide. I don’t think you can even really do that on NixOS.

However, it has nothing to do with security though, but rather dependency isolation, so you can use one version of library X for one project and another for the other without them conflicting.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

I often stumble on this example of nix usage - a one-off shell with a a specific package. This is such a niche and seemingly unimportant use case, that it’s really strange to have it mentioned so often.

It’s probably one of the simplest things you can do with it that isn’t really possible with other package managers and also doesn’t require explaining any internals, I guess that’s why.

I could also tell you about easily being able to build statically linked binaries or cross-compile (or both) with the same package definition without having to do any extra work, that might be more impressive.

The other use case that is often brought up is for managing dev environments, but for a lot of popular languages (Python, Node, Java, Rust, etc. ) there are proven environment management options already (pyenv and poetry, nvm, jenv, rustup).

Yeah, and neither of them considered that it might be important to deal with software written in other languages. Want to link against a C library in a Rust project? Run some tool as part of NPM build step? Screw you, install it manually from elsewhere or your build fails. The only one that I know does do this is OCaml’s OPAM, which does have a lot of non-OCaml software packaged. (Also at least the latter three seem to be only for setting up the language itself. What is this, a package manager for a single package?)

Not to mention Docker.

Meh, Docker is kind of a joke. Sure, it solves the problem of dependencies, but in possibly the stupidest way possible bar shipping a VirtualBox image. A lot of prebuilt images are x86_64 only. It needs to run a Linux VM on Mac and Windows (tbf Nix doesn’t have a native Windows version at the moment either, you need to run it in WSL, but people are working on that). So that means running at native performance on an ARM Mac, which are quite common for development I think, is out from the start. It also adds a lot of complexity to your environment due to wrapping everything in a container if you just want to have a couple tools. You don’t get your nicely configured shell, other system tools, anything else inside the container. I haven’t ever tried it but you probably also need special support from any IDE you want to use.

(And not to mention most Dockerfiles being absolutely not reproducible, but you can solve that… with Nix :^) )

• GUI app shortcuts work in neither of the OSs

On Linux I think you need to link ~/.local/share/applications to home-manager’s share/applications. Not sure about Mac, its GUI kind of hates symlinks and Nix uses a lot of symlinks. Spotlight doesn’t read anything behind symlinks at all, for example, and Launchpad resolves them so after a package update it will not pick up the new versions because it’s still looking at the old path.

• error messages are about as readable as the ones you get for C++ templates

Unfortunately true, yeah. I also think this isn’t really a problem that can be solved due to Nix being a dynamically typed language that has everything be an expression (so there’s no fixed structure whatsoever) and also using lazy evaluation everywhere. Three components that all decrease the capability for useful error messages and debugging, and together… yeah it can get pretty bad.

• a lot of troubleshooting searches to unsolved GitHub issues

Really? This hasn’t been my experience at all. There’s a couple like that, sure, like the build sandbox on Mac, but they’re rare. And usually people in the community channel know a workaround :^)

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Ehhhh, security by obscurity if anything. Every downloaded or built nix package is in /nix/store and readable for every user.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

I’m really liking Apple Music. Mainly because it’s streaming bolted on to a real music library manager, so you can do stuff like edit song metadata, 5-star song ratings (though they really want you to use the stupid favorite system that Spotify also has), playlists that let you filter your library based on rules, and even add/upload your own tracks, so anything that’s missing you can add yourself.

Though I’m not sure how the experience is if you don’t have a Mac, as the web client is hot garbage and they don’t have a native Linux client.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Which downside? What do you mean? Everything I’ve added to it locally is in its own folder, and it’s a copy of the original files.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Ahh, I see. Yeah that absolutely shouldn’t happen, at least not by default… Though I believe I’ve added an album that’s already in Apple Music once and it also kept the local files. Maybe in those cases it deleted the local files as the disk was getting full to clear up space, or something? Definitely inexcusable though :V

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

I’ve used SongShift before to transfer playlists between music services. Looks like it can also export them to a file.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

In which way is it not viable yet? I guess it depends a lot on what app you use but I’ve been happy with OsmAnd and Organic Maps.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Ah, for realtime traffic, check out Magic Earth.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

I think I once read they sell it (including the real time traffic data) for use in car infotainment systems and other specialized hardware that needs GPS navigation.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

I need to be able to RDP with multiple screens to my work laptop running Windows 10.

They aren’t.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Apt is the greatest package manager ever built.

Urgh, no, it’s not. Everything about it is super crusty if you go beyond simply installing packages and adding others’ PPAs IMO.

1. Packages often enable the services they install right away. Someone told me they got locked out over SSH because they installed a firewall package that locked everything down by default, and the service got started on install. I guess that’s technically more of an issue with the way things are packaged rather than the package manager itself, though.
2. To temporarily install a package (so that it will get uninstalled with the next autoremove) you need to use aptitude to install the package, or run apt-mark auto after installing (which will also clear the manually installed flag if it was manually installed before), apt has no syntax for it.
3. dpkg-scanpackages is eternally slow, I had to write a wrapper for it that runs it separately for every package and caches the result because I didn’t want to wait multiple minutes for it to rebuild the PPA package index
4. The standard packaging tools (dh-make or debuild, I think I’ve looked at both) are insane, so much so that I gave up and wrote something that takes files similar to Arch PKGBUILDs which calls dpkg-deb at the very end.

I could probably list more but I haven’t had to touch apt in a while, thankfully. But it is probably the #1 reason I avoid anything Debian-based. #2 is probably their Frankenstein sysvinit/systemd setup.

I do have to say that apt remove vs purge is pretty cool though.

What do you like about it?

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

openSuSE is cool. It was the first distro I installed way back around 2010 and still the one I would recommend to new people.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

I’m not talking about apt the CLI tool, but the actual package manager. The plain apt tool is only designed to be a convenience wrapper for common workflows implemented in other tools.

Sure, but the interface is probably just as important as the actual logic behind it, isn’t it?

As you correctly pointed out, Apt has the distinction between packages installed as a dependency (“auto installed”) versus packages installed directly (“manually installed”). This is precisely one of the reasons why I consider Apt the best package manager.

Honestly I would consider that one of the fundamental things a package manager must do, I didn’t think it was a special thing haha

If you want to install a package as manual, then later mark it as auto, you can do that with apt-mark.

Yeah, I know. But if you want to manually install a package like that, you have to remember the extra step after it’s finished installing instead of before the install. It’s just unergonomic, for something that could be a flag (e.g. in emerge -1) and that I at least use fairly often.

Another problem with it being a two-step thing is that if you do it unconditionally in a script, it doesn’t retain the flag from before the previous installation command, you need a third step, i.e. checking if the package was installed before. My use case for this was installing dependencies for a package build which should be able to be removed again afterward, while not affecting the subset that were already installed explicitly.

Now that I think about it, it’s probably a good idea to always check if a package needs to be installed before installing it if you script it, though, because otherwise it might be unnecessarily reinstalled. Fair enough.

Are you maintaining a PPA for others?

Yeah, I maintain some software/config/meta packages for the computers at the uni I study at. Before, I’m pretty sure the packages were manually packaged with every update and I wanted to automate it a bit and also make clear how to get from the source tarballs to the final build.

On the other hand, in Debian, they rehost the upstream package and add the debian directory. This means that building Debian packages is mostly hermetic: you don’t need access to the network.

Ahh, the way it’s structured makes a lot more sense knowing that. Coming from packaging stuff for Arch, Gentoo and NixOS, where the packaging process is essentially the same for all three, with you usually supplying source download URLs, I had absolutely no idea how debian/rules would allow me to do anything and felt like I was missing a big thing. I guess it really is just a Makefile that you run directly, and that makes sense if you already have the sources in your tree?

• Pinning, and relatedly that packages can include version constraints in their dependencies.

This, at least version constraints, is another one I’d consider essential tbh. The rest are great though, I agree.

2xsaiko , 4 months ago

Oh god. I thought at least Apple had some standard of quality left for the software they’re releasing. Though considering this isn’t for their own platform, and their track record for their other Windows software (at least iTunes) maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised.