Oinks

It's wild how on the orange website I can read entirely sensible discussions about tricky Bash semantics or whatever, while people in a parallel thread are seriously arguing the Trump admin's repressions are dwarfed by... whatever "repressions" they think happened during Covid. And I don't even click on the threads about disabilities (especially autism) anymore because it's so predictably sad.

Yeah some people seem to have this expectation that there should just magically be a button to unbreak the PC. They talk about their personal pain points when using Linux as if there's a conspiracy of devs to hide the unbreak buttons for the sake of elitism, but that... just isn't a thing? If it was that easy to fix an issue, you probably wouldn't need to fix it because the system would already come unbroken by default. I sympathize with everyone's Bluetooth configuration woes but mostly it's a pain in the ass because Bluetooth, in general, is a pain in the ass, not because of elitist devs (who I should mention are doing this in their free time for no pay. There's almost no money in desktop Linux, unlike in servers).

kwriteconfig6 is barely documented because you're not really supposed to use it. All of the settings that users are expected to change are in the nice settings app that Plasma ships with. Using kwriteconfig (or equivalently a dconf editor on GNOME) is like editing the registry on Windows; you are implicitly opting into more power, out of most guardrails and into potential breakage. The UX being a bit questionable (though honestly it's really not as bad as you're saying, it does exactly what it sounds like it will do?) is to a degree intentional, because you're not supposed to be using this unless you know what you are doing.

Also coming from Arch will induce a bit of a culture shock regarding documentation as the NixOS wiki is just... not very good. It's neither complete nor reliably accurate for the current release. And some wiki pages are actually just snippets with no explanation for either what they do or why they do it.

As a Home-Manager user I would argue it's not really worth it. It has it's moments for some applications but most of the time it's the same experience as editing the config files directly. Except instead of INI or TOML it's stringly typed Nix attrsets and you need to rebuild the entire system instead of restarting the app. Not exactly a huge improvement.

And that's when you're lucky enough that what you're configuring can be mapped to attrsets. Styling Waybar via Home-Manager means writing CSS but it's a multi line string in Nix with no appropriate editor support whatsoever, and writing custom actions for Nixvim means writing Neovim-Lua but... that's right, in a multi line string.

On a more positive note, I will second the recommendation for the NixOS & Flakes Book, I found it to be much more useful for getting my head around flakes (and Nix in general since I started using them fairly early on in my Nix journey) than e.g. Vimjoyer's videos, which are good but their repositories were really really cryptic to me at the beginning.

I'm not sure why nix-env is so slow exactly but it's the wrong tool to use anyways as it just throws away everything NixOS has going for itself in favour of pretending to be a normal package manager. You really just want to use the configuration file.

The "normal" way to install packages in NixOS would be using environment.systemPackages. The various programs.<name> options are intended for packages requiring additional setup, like shells or desktop environments (e.g. iirc for sway it creates a systemd target and adds the .desktop files for login managers to see it). Weston has a package but not an option, so you'd have to figure that additional stuff out yourself (but running Weston from a tty should just work).

There are additional ways to install packages for single users or using home-manager but you don't need those.

This does kinda demonstrate why (I personally think) NixOS is so hard to learn: There's a million different ways to do anything and each has it's own weird gotchas. And critically most of them, even when they are honestly just legacy cruft, are not actually deprecated and may even have users advocating their use, or even if they don't nobody bothered to remove that part from the wiki (if it was ever there to begin with).

You can also see this in the flake/channel split: One person in this very thread is telling you to use flakes, while another is telling you to stick with the default (channels).

And in some (fortunately relatively rare) cases even things that everyone agrees are bad ideas still get promoted in official documentation or other prominent places, like using nix-env -i under any circumstances, ever.

And it is definitely a learning problem you are having. You are facing the same problems as a new Linux user who just installed Manjaro with KDE 6 on Wayland and is wondering why apt-get and xrandr are not working even though those are accepted answers on Stackoverflow posts from 2012. Of course as experienced Linux users we know why, but a new one has to learn a lot of stuff before "getting it" and will probably stumble onto poor advice more than once in their journey. (And learning Nix is arguably worse than learning Linux for the first time, but that depends a bit on your exact experience and background.)

If you stick to learning NixOS there will be a point when these things seem trivial, but it will be a lot of effort to get there. Is that effort worth it? Well, if the term "declarative package management" doesn't mean anything to you, maybe not. You do sacrifice a lot of things "just" to declare your entire system state in one configuration file (or more likely, directory). But I do think the things Nix does are really cool, if you can get over the, uh, everything.

You could say that about any kind of autocomplete. Why would people install snippet plugins into their vim/emacs? Sure you can just type everything by hand but it's just more convenient.

Personally I find these kinds of inline AI suggestions make a more convincing use case than trying to prompt engineer a Chat based LLM and diverting your attention to phrasing specifics instead of the actual problem space.

It doesn't help that US diverging diamonds seem to insist on having pedestrians walk through the median.

But honestly all interchanges are varying degrees of horrible and if you want your city to be bearable to navigate as a pedestrian/cyclist you just really don't want to do urban highways, or roads above a certain size in general.

The GDPR conversation is hilarious. Sure they're a US based company, but after 5 years of operation I would've expected them to have consulted a lawyer about this at some point. Forgetting (assuming it's not "forgetting") about the required documentation is not the worst thing in the world morally but it doesn't exactly make them look competent either.

To be fair this also happened to Eagle Dynamics, developer of DCS, the other "realistic" flight sim that players take far too seriously. Except there it was a Dev that got arrested in Georgia and extradited to the US...

Depends on where one lived at the time I suppose, the Russian economy didn't exactly do great. It wasn't life ending for the majority of people, but then neither was Fukushima, or most of these really.

While unfortunate, not shipping these standard Google apps is not really an option for any Android manufacturer due to Google requirements. Including them is required if you want to use anything from the GSM, which includes things like the Play Store and everything it touches. You can technically ship a different Android distribution like Lineage or /e/, but that's not really what most people will be expecting of an "Android" phone and will narrow the viable target demographic even more than the value proposition already does.