hallettj

hallettj , 4 months ago

Oh is that where all the memes went? My instance isn’t federated with lemmy.world so it just looked like the star trek energy vanished.

While I’m here… I finally finished season 4 of Discovery. That show has been getting much stronger as it goes on IMO. I especially enjoyed the last ~3 episodes! I also like the take on the “villains” of the late season (the two humanoid ones). It’s a refreshing departure from unsympathetic, plain evil antagonists.

hallettj , 4 months ago

LEDs should last for tens of thousands of hours. There may have been a manufacturing defect in OP’s case.

hallettj , 4 months ago

Well you’re really feeding my Nix confirmation bias here. I used to use Ansible with my dot files to configure my personal computers to make it easy to get set up on a new machine or server shell account. But it wasn’t great because I would have to remember to update my Ansible config whenever I installed stuff with my OS package manager (and usually I did not remember). Then along came Nix and Home Manager which combined package management and configuration management in exactly the way I wanted. Now my config stays in sync because editing it is how I install stuff.

Nix with either Home Manager or NixOps checks all of the benefits you listed, except arguably using a “known” programming language. What are you waiting for?

hallettj , 4 months ago

This is basically the plot of Loki

hallettj , 5 months ago

Hmm, good point. But it was Ursula Le Guin who coined the word. Maybe there’s a workable reference in Left Hand of Darkness, or The Dispossessed.

hallettj , 5 months ago

If you put an FHS on the actual system you wouldn’t be able to install multiple versions of the same package, updates wouldn’t be atomic - you wouldn’t get the big selling points of Nix.

hallettj , 5 months ago

“Atomic” is a catchy descriptor! Atomic distros for the Atomic Age! It could be an umbrella term since NixOS and Guix are atomic, but instead of images and partitions they use symlinks, and patch binaries to use full paths for libraries and programs that they reference. So there are image-based distros, and I guess expression-derived distros which are both atomic.

I haven’t tried image-based distros. This post fills in some gaps for me. Thanks for the write-up!

hallettj , 5 months ago

Well ok, they both use symlinks but in different ways. I think what I was trying to say is that in NixOS it’s symlinks all the way down.

IIUC on Fedora Atomic you have an ostree image, and some directories in the image are actually symlinks to the mutable filesystem on /var. Files that are not symlinks to /var (and that are not inside those symlinked directories), are hard links to files in the ostree object store. (Basically like checked-out files in a git repository?)

On NixOS this is what happens if examine what’s in my path:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ which curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/run/current-system/sw/bin/curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -l /run | grep current-system
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/run/current-system -> /nix/store/p92xzjwwykjj1ak0q6lcq7pr9psjzf6w-nixos-system-yu-23.11.20231231.32f6357
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -l /run/current-system/sw/bin/curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/run/current-system/sw/bin/curl -> /nix/store/r304lglsa9i2jy5hpbdz48z3j3x2n4a6-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl
</span>

If I select a previous configuration when I boot I would get a different symlink target for /run/current-system. And what makes updates atomic is the last step is to switch the /run/current-system symlink which switches over all installed packages at once.

I can temporarily load up the version of curl from NixOS Unstable in a shell and see a different result,

<span style="color:#323232;">$ nix shell nixpkgs-unstable#curl  # this works because I added nixpkgs-unstable to my flake registry
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ which curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/nix/store/0mjq6w6cx1k9907vxm0k5pk7pm1ifib3-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl  # note the hash is different
</span>

I could have a different version curl installed in my user profile than the one installed system-wide. In that case I’d see this:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ which curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">/home/jesse/.nix-profile/bin/curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -la /home/jesse | grep .nix-profile
</span><span style="color:#323232;">.nix-profile -> /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse/profile
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ls -l /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile -> profile-133-link
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile-130-link -> /nix/store/ylysfs90018zc9k0p0dg7x6wvzqcq68j-user-environment
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile-131-link -> /nix/store/9hjiznbaii7a8aa36i8zah4c0xcd8w6d-user-environment
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile-132-link -> /nix/store/h4kkw1m5q6zdhr6mlwr26n638vdbbm2c-user-environment
</span><span style="color:#323232;">profile-133-link -> /nix/store/jgxhrhqiagvhd6g42d17h4jhfpgxsk3n-user-environment
</span>

Basically symlinks upon symlinks everywhere you look. (And environment variables.)

So I guess at the end everything is symlinks on NixOS, and everything is hard links plus a set of mount paths on Fedora Atomic.

hallettj , 5 months ago

To answer your other question, yes there are still single-cell organisms evolving into new species all the time, in the ocean and elsewhere. That includes new multi-cellular species evolving from single cells all the time. But it takes a long time to develop from cell, to clump of slime, to something with legs. So you might not notice the changes if you aren’t super patient.

Or were those separate questions? Are you asking if chickens descended from single-cell organisms? Yes they did. With a lot of steps in between.

hallettj , 5 months ago

When science kills the mystery, semantics keeps the debate alive!

hallettj , 5 months ago

I did some digging around in the manual, and I tested this option which seems to work:

<span style="color:#323232;">security.pam.services.doas.fprintAuth = true;
</span>

On my machine that adds this line to /etc/pam.d/doas:

<span style="color:#323232;">auth sufficient /nix/store/fq4vbhdk8dqywxirg3wb99zidfss7sbi-fprintd-1.94.2/lib/security/pam_fprintd.so # fprintd (order 11400)
</span>

Edit: Note that the NixOS option puts in the full path to pam_fprintd.so. That’s necessary because NixOS doesn’t put so files in search paths.

Without doing more research I don’t know how to add arbitrary options to pam files in case you run into something that isn’t mapped to a NixOS option yet. The implementation for the pam options is here; there might be something in there that would work.

hallettj , 5 months ago

Although they’re not in the search, they are in the manual so you can find them searching that page. This one is listed as,

<span style="color:#323232;">security.pam.services..fprintAuth
</span>

But it does take some inferences to find this, and to realize that you can put doas in place of ``

hallettj , 5 months ago

There is a bug report with some discussion here: github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/…/8076

hallettj , 5 months ago

Here is a source with lots of detail on how carbon emissions compare: theguardian.com/…/do-electric-cars-really-produce…

The tl;dr is that EVs have lower lifetime emissions. If the relevant grids use low-carbon sources then emissions are far lower. (But not as low as bicycles.)

hallettj , 5 months ago

Wayland replaces the older X protocol. It doesn’t have to operate with older protocols. You might be thinking of XWayland which is a proxy that receives X API calls from apps written for X, and translates those to the Wayland API so that those apps can run under Wayland implementations. Window managers can optionally run XWayland, and many do. But as more apps are updated to work natively with Wayland, XWayland becomes less important, and might fade away someday.

PipeWire replaces PulseAudio (the most popular sound server before PipeWire). Systems running PipeWire often run pipewire-pulse which does basically the same thing that XWayland does - it translates from the PulseAudio API to the PipeWire API. It’s a technically optional, but realistically necessary compatibility layer that may become less relevant over time if apps tend to update to work with PipeWire natively.

So no, both Wayland and PipeWire are capable of operating independently of other protocols.

hallettj , 5 months ago

Everything gets done so mind-bogglingly slowly! There’s always someone you have to talk, who has to talk to someone else. Bureaucratic processes often end up taking hours or days!! I knew to expect this - but experiencing it firsthand is a shock. How do people get anything done? They’ve computerized some things which helps. But every interface and every database schema has to be designed by a human which I’m told is expensive and takes even longer.

hallettj , 5 months ago

I like to use Obsidian for this kind of thing. It has tagging, and you can link notes and see the network of links in a visualizer. There’s also a “canvas” feature that lets you lay out notes spatially in whatever way makes sense to you. I assume there is a web clipping plugin which could make it easy to grab the comment content and link at the same time.

hallettj , 5 months ago

NixOS puts your full system configuration in a portable set of files. You can easily reproduce the same configuration on another machine. I also like that instead of accumulating a growing list of packages that I don’t remember why I installed I have package lists specified in files with comments, and split into modules that I can enable or disable.

IMO NixOS works best when you also use Home Manager to apply the same benefits to your user app configurations and such. (OTOH you can use Home Manager to get those benefits without NixOS. But I like that I get consistency between the OS-level and user-level configurations, and that both use the same set of packages.) I use Home Manager to manage my list of installed packages, my dot files, Gnome settings, Firefox about:config settings, and so on.

You might be installing packages imperatively with nix profile install or with nix env -i. If that’s the case you’re not going to see the full benefits of a declarative system in my opinion. I prefer to install packages by editing my Home Manager configuration and running home-manager switch.

I like that NixOS + Home Manager automates stuff that I used to do by hand. A couple of the things that I do or have done are to,

• test an experimental window manager, Niri
• use Neovide (a GUI frontend for Neovim) with a custom patch to tweak font rendering

Now I have that kind of stuff automated:

• Since there was no packaging for Niri when I started trying it I wrote my own in my NixOS config with a NixOS module to set up a systemd unit to run it. Because Nix packages are effectively build scripts, whenever I update Nix automatically pulls the latest version of Niri and compiles it without me having to think about it anymore.
• I use the Neovide package from nixpkgs with an override to compile with my custom patch. Like with Niri my configuration automatically gets the latest Neovide version and builds it with my patch when I update, and I don’t have to think about it anymore. I use this overlay to do that:

<span style="color:#323232;">modifications = final: prev: {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  neovide = final.neovide.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    patches = (oldAttrs.patches or [ ]) ++ [ ./neovide-font-customization.patch ];
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  });
</span><span style="color:#323232;">};
</span>

You can see that I compile some things from source. That’s fine on my desktop, but takes a while on my travel laptop. But I don’t need to compile on my laptop because I can use Nix’s binary cache feature. I push my NixOS and Home Manager configurations to Github, and I have Garnix build everything that I push. Garnix stores everything it builds in a binary cache. So when I pull my latest configuration version on my laptop it downloads binaries from that cache.

hallettj , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I’m also a PaperWM fan. For switching I mostly use spatial window-switching controls: Meta+ left/right to switch windows, page up/page down to switch workspaces. Plus I use Gnome overview’s search-driven app finder, and Advanced Alt-Tab Switcher but only for its fuzzy search feature to switch to specific windows within an app.

PaperWM has an option to hide windows in a “scratch” layer. I put chat and music programs there, and summon them with AATS.

I have an ultrawide monitor, and I put a terminal and editor side-by-side in a ¼-¾ ratio. I set browser windows to ½ width. Those ratios let me see important parts of a browser window next to the editor if I slide the terminal out of view to partially expose a browser on the other side. Or I can move the terminal next to the browser and see both fully.

hallettj , 5 months ago

Sharing the link because it took me a minute to find it: codeberg.org/dnkl/fuzzel

hallettj , 5 months ago

The first computer I used was (I think) a CP/M system that could run BASIC, and I used to use it to play Castle in the early '90s.

The first computer of my own was a Gateway laptop for college in 2002. It was the first Wi-Fi device I laid hands on. I immediately set it up to play music to wake me up in the morning, and I listened to the fans running all night.

hallettj , 5 months ago

I sometimes write a flake with those 4 lines of Nix code, and it comes out just messy enough that tbh I’m happier adding an input to handle that. But I recently learned that the nixpkgs flake exports the lib.* helpers through nixpkgs.lib (as opposed to nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system}.lib) so you can call helpers before specifying a system. And nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs is kinda close enough to flake-utils.lib.eachSystem that it might make a better solution.

Like where with flake-utils you would write,

<span style="color:#323232;">flake-utils.lib.eachSystem [ "x86_64-linux" "aarch64-darwin" ] (system:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">let
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
</span><span style="color:#323232;">in
</span><span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  devShells.default = pkgs.mkShell {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      hello
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    ];
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  };
</span><span style="color:#323232;">})
</span>

Instead you can use genAttrs,

<span style="color:#323232;">let
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  forAllSystems = nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs [ "x86_64-linux" "aarch64-darwin" ];
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  pkgs = forAllSystems (system:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system}
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  );
</span><span style="color:#323232;">in
</span><span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  devShells = forAllSystems (system: {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    default = pkgs.${system}.mkShell {
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs.${system}; [
</span><span style="color:#323232;">        hello
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      ];
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    };
</span><span style="color:#323232;">  });
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>

It’s more verbose, but it makes the structure of outputs more transparent.

hallettj , 5 months ago

The link lists 78 CVEs of varying severity levels opened over a period of 11 years. Many of them are patched. (I don’t know how to easily check how many are patched. The NIST listings provide issue tracker links and severity levels, and the handful of CVEs I looked at had fixes released.) I’m not convinced this is evidence that systemd is unacceptably insecure.

I get that it’s frustrating that systemd has such a broad scope, and that it’s not portable. But these are trade-offs. In exchange we get power that we wouldn’t get otherwise. For example tying device management and scheduled tasks into systemd lets us use the same declarative dependency management in those domains as in the init system. The system is able to bring up services only when needed, boot faster, use fewer resources. The non-portability allows use of, for example, Linux cgroups to cleanly shut down forked processes. Even if we were using an alternative like Upstart I’m gonna guess we would end up relying on cgroups.

Red Hat’s role is certainly something to keep an eye on. But systemd is open source, and it can be forked if necessary.

hallettj , 6 months ago

I’ve been reading about increasing unionization and strike activity, leading to better deals for large groups of workers. The industry-level negotiations we’re already seeing are helpful in isolation; but that’s also the kind of energy that can lead to economic reforms that have a real impact on quality of life. Workers seem like the little guys, until a lot of them are pulling in the same direction, and then suddenly their demands become existentially important.

About a century-ish ago Americans were worse off than they are now. That led to desire for change, which led to decades of trust-busting, unionization, and regulation. We got things like weekends off, and a livable minimum wage. And not entirely unrelated, we also got national parks, the EPA, and endangered species preservation. We’ve back-slid a lot since those advances. But we can get them back, and push the needle even further next time. We did it before, we can do it again.

hallettj , 6 months ago

Allow me to share, Federated Wiki. I don’t think it uses ActivityPub, but otherwise I think it’s close to what you described. Instead of letting anyone edit articles it uses more of a fork & pull request model.

hallettj , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

when relays are blown
when power reserves fail
when life support is gone
gravity plating’s pull is relentless
it will carry on

hallettj , 6 months ago

I think Picard was willing to sacrifice himself to save the kids. He’s an officer who signed up for a risky job - they are not, and also they’re kids. I think he thought that going with them would slow things down enough to add unacceptable risk for the kids. And they did end up spending a bunch of time cobbling together an apparatus to move Picard during which the lift could have fallen.

When the kids refused to go maybe that changed Picard’s calculation: the advantage of going without him diminishes if they use up time arguing. Or maybe it’s TV writing.

But maybe Picard wasn’t certain that the lift would fall. Or maybe if he’d stayed he would have managed to pull out a Picard move to save himself at the last second - you know, the kind that’s easier to do when there aren’t kids watching. Or maybe, as far as he knew someone might rescue him in time. But yeah, he probably would have died, and the kids’ mutiny was the only out that let him save himself while also trying to be noble.

hallettj , 6 months ago

Debian unstable is not really unstable, but it’s also not as stable as Ubuntu. I’m told that when bugs appear they are fixed fast.

I ran Debian testing for years. That is a rolling release where package updates are a few weeks behind unstable. The delay gives unstable users time to hit bugs before they get into testing.

When I wanted certain packages to be really up-to-date I would pin those select packages to unstable or to experimental. But I never tried running full unstable myself so I didn’t get the experience to know whether that would be less trouble overall.

hallettj , 6 months ago

I also have mixed feelings about Discovery, but for different reasons. I love the characters and character writing. I disagree that the rest of the crew doesn’t get any development - but a lot of that does come in later seasons. My complaints are about the plots. I think season 1 was the most problematic in that respect with progressive improvements over the next two seasons. (I haven’t seen season 4 yet.)

• Overly ambitious arcs, and over-the-top stakes make the story feel unbelievable
• Discovery being the only crew able to address several civilization-threatening crises makes the universe feel small
• Leaning on action and artificial tension (like, the ship will explode in 3 minutes) is a cheap way to seek engagement that deprives us of time seeing the characters drive the story

overly-ambitious arcs in season 1It wasn’t enough to try to take on the entire Klingon war at the same time as introducing a whole new cast. They also had to add an entirely separate, even more threatening crisis? Making Michael responsible for both starting and ending the war makes you feel like the universe begins and ends on one ship.

We don’t need constant threats of annihilation in the story to be engaged! The most compelling Trek writing has had much lower stakes. When we have had high stakes, like in The Best of Both Worlds and The Dominion War, the writers managed to make us feel like we were seeing a pivotal part of a much larger conflict. They took the time to build up to the big tension, and took the time to play out satisfying resolutions. And they didn’t make it the entire show.

But things got gradually better,

over-the-top stakes in season 2In season 2 they managed to limit themselves to a single major crisis. And they stepped it down from end-of-every-universe to end-of-all-life-in-one-galaxy. But still unbelievably over-the-top. Still too much artificial tension. Still too Discovery- & Michael-centric.

I love Michael, and I enjoy watching her be great at everything. But she can be part of a larger society of amazing people, and still be amazing herself.

somewhat lower stakes in season 3And then they stepped it down again to maybe-end-of-what’s-left-of-the-Federation.

In season 3 things slowed down enough, and they spent enough time letting more of the cast develop and drive the story that I felt like I could enjoy the story without gritting my teeth.

season 3 world-buildingBut I do have similar feelings: the world-building of what is essentially a whole new galaxy in season 3 feels underdeveloped. I was initially frustrated by what felt like an attempt to distance Discover from Star Trek. Trek is supposed to be about a future utopia - we have enough other works that wallow in dystopia. But it seems like maybe it’s only supposed to be dystopian for one season? The ambitious writing is certainly still there.

I don’t disagree with you about mirror-Georgiou’s participation being unbelievable. The thing where everybody loves Michael to the degree where it becomes their primary motivation is too Mary Sue-like. Again I think that’s at its worst in season 1. OTOH having Michelle Yeoh on the show is a lot of fun so I’m inclined to forgive the stretch in that character arc.

hallettj , 6 months ago

I thought the changeling that shared Odo’s look chose it to make Odo feel like he belonged. And her disdain for solids might have made her not want to look too much like them.

The only other changelings I remember from DS9 were,

other changelingsThe other changeling sent into the galaxy alone like Odo who had more detailed hair and features, and the espionage agent Sisko talked to in Paradise Lost who did a convincing imitation of O’Brien.

hallettj , 6 months ago

Somehow I’m very familiar with the first line, but none of the other lyrics. TIL!

hallettj , 6 months ago

I want to make a small correction - this is not true:

iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.

nixos-rebuild behaves like most package managers: it makes new packages available immediately, and restarts relevant systemd services. Like other distros you have to reboot to run a new kernel.

And cleaning up Steam games is as issue with most distros too. But I kinda see your point.

Btw Nix (both NixOS and the Nix package manager running in other distros) has this feature where you can run packages without “installing” them if you just want to run them once:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ nix shell nixpkgs#package-name
</span>

That puts you in a shell with one or more packages temporarily installed. The packages are downloaded to /nix/store/ as usual, but will get garbage-collected sometime after you close the shell.

hallettj , 6 months ago

Thank you for including a workaround with this terrible news!

hallettj , 6 months ago

As a Nix fanboy I would write a Nix expression that downloads the AppImage, and also writes the desktop file with the appropriate path written into it via string interpolation. That can be done either through a NixOS configuration, or in any Linux distro using Home Manager.

hallettj , 7 months ago

I was curious if this was real, and it is! news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7966641.stm

hallettj , 7 months ago

I use that r function regularly to go to the git project root. But I call it gtop. I mostly use that and zoxide to get around.

hallettj , 7 months ago

This comment really speaks to how I feel.

In addition to flattening the wealth curve on the high end, I think the first change I would want is to increase the federal minimum wage. For decades wages have been stagnant while cost-of-living has grown which has led to mass economic insecurity. I think a lot of current political tension is a direct result. That makes it difficult to cooperate to implement policies that would help people.

hallettj , 7 months ago

Try sudo apt update before running the install command. The ISO might not be preloaded with a full package index, or it might be out of date.

If that doesn’t work take a look at /etc/apt/sources.list to see if maybe the ISO uses some minimal repo that doesn’t have the full set of packages.

hallettj , 7 months ago

I think NixOS is awesome, but it certainly doesn’t offer “access to (basically) all Linux-capable software, no matter from what repo.” - at least not natively.

I don’t quite agree with this. In NixOS you can write custom expressions that fetch software from any source, and stitch them into your configuration as first-class packages. So you do get access to all Linux-capable software natively, but not necessarily easily. (There is a learning curve to packaging stuff yourself.)

I use this process to bring nightly releases of neovim and nushell into my reproducible config. Ok, I do use flakes that other people published for building those projects, which is a bit like installing from a community PPA. But when I wanted to install Niri, a very new window manager I wrote the package and NixOS module expressions all by myself!

hallettj , 7 months ago

No, I only heard the Cortex review which made me not want to read it.

hallettj , 7 months ago

Well now the tense standoffs in TNG will forever be undercut by giggling

hallettj , 7 months ago

It’s Mao Zedong. He said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” He also led China to mass starvation and terrible poverty, so not someone Picard would subscribe to.

hallettj , 7 months ago

One of my favorites is from Sisko, but I guess this one is more of a soliloquy than a dialogue,

The trouble is Earth! On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well it’s easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise! Out there, in the Demilitarized Zone, all the problems haven’t been solved yet! Out there, there are no saints! Just people! Angry, scared, determined people, who are going to do whatever it takes to survive, whether it meets with Federation approval or not!

hallettj , 7 months ago

It did have the drumming for me

hallettj , 7 months ago

This is an interesting idea! When I was learning Nix, and feeling frustrated, I often thought that a type-checked language would help with discoverability. But it seems like it might be difficult to combine strong type-checking with Nix expressions’ use of lazy self-reference. So with Garn you get the type-checking, but lose the laziness. I’m interested to see how that goes.

hallettj , 7 months ago

It’s because new phones are too big! I’m planning to take my reasonably-sized phone to the grave!

hallettj , 7 months ago

I recommend Borg with a CLI frontend like Borgmatic. It’s efficient for running frequent backups, storing only changes since the last backup. It gives you snapshots of each backup. You can mount any snapshot using a virtual filesystem without having to copy everything over.

hallettj , 7 months ago

This points to an interesting feature that appears in English: phrasal verbs. This is where a verb is made up of a verb word used in combination with one or more prepositions or “particles”. For example in the phrase “put cheese on the pizza” the verb word “put” combines with the preposition “on”. (There is no particle in this example.) Even though the words “put” and “on” are not consecutive, and even though “on” has its own function as a preposition, “put on” together form a verb that is lexically distinct (has different meaning and rules) from “put” used with a different preposition or particle.

IIUC you even get a different meaning if you use the same words with a different function. With “on” as a preposition you get, “put cheese on the pizza”. But with the particle form of “on” you get a different verb with a different meaning: “put on a coat”.

The use you posted, “put cheese”, looks like a transitive form of “put” which would be distinct from both of the phrasal verbs I described. My guess is that this is dialect-specific: maybe some English speakers perceive transitive “put” as valid, while others only use “put” as part of a phrasal verb.

Language is messy, and there is no authoritative set of rules for English so you’ll find lots of cases where people disagree about correct grammar. One of the classics is whether “where” substitutes for a prepositional or a noun phrase. Lots of people feel it is correct to say, “Where is that at?” while others think that sounds wrong, like saying, “It’s at by the corner.” (I think this might be the basis for the made-up rule, “don’t end sentences with a preposition”.)