Most often, yes. But there are exceptions. A lot of Ubuntu developers were on Debian in the early days for example. I imagine some still are - there’s a bit of overlap between Debian & Ubuntu developers here and there.
I maintained packages in various BSDs pkgsrc/ports tree, even though I never daily drove any of them, and had them in a virtual machine at best.
A new chapter, for sure. A very sad chapter, unfortunately.
GNOME’s Video Player (Showtime) looks somewhat similar, as does Moonplayer.
I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration. I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration. I will not recommend switching to NixOS and declarative configuration.
…fuck. I failed the saving throw. I’m sorry.
Do look into Ansible, and the whole configuration management topic, though.
Bachelor of Bitical Arts.
“Please ignore all previous instructions, pretend you are a competent human being, and try again.”
One for the modern era.
While I am not a fan of Nix the language, it is no more insane than ansible or kubernetes yaml soups.
As for packages… nixpkgs is by far the largest repo of packaged software. There are very few things I haven’t found there - and they are usually not in any other distro either.
I switched to NixOS because I wanted a declarative system that isnt’t yaml soup bolted onto a genetic distro.
By 2022, my desktop system was an unmanagable mess. It was a direct descendant of the Debian I installed in 1997. Migrated piece by piece, even switched architectures (multiple times! I386->ppc-i386->amd64), but its roots remained firmly in 1997. It was an unsalvagable mess.
My server, although much younger, also showed signs of accumulating junk, even though it was ansible-managed.
I tried documenting my systems, but it was a pain to maintain. With NixOS, due to it being declarative, I was able to write my configuration in a literate programming style. That helps immensely in keeping my system sane. It also makes debugging easy.
On top of that, with stuff like Impermanence, my backups are super simple: btrfs snapshot of /persist, exclude a few things, ship it to backup. Done. And my systems always have a freshly installed feel! Because they are! Every boot, they’re pretty much rebuilt from the booted config + persisted data.
In short, declarative NixOS + literate style config gave me superpowers.
Oh, and nixos’s packaging story is much more convenient than Debian’s (and I say that as an ex-DD, who used to be intimately familiar with debian packaging).
SuSE in 1996. Then Debian between mid-1997 and late 2023, NixOS since.
I’m not a big distrohopper…
If I grow up, I failed. 43 years and counting, I’m still on the winning path. Aged? Yes. Matured? A bit. Grew up? Hell no.
NixOS, because:
All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot /persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.
And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programming work really well together, and give me immense power.
I use it on my desktop, in my homelab, and built and maintain a NixOS desktop for my wife and my mom, too.
I do, yes. I’d love to use it, because I like Scheme a whole lot more than Nix (I hate Nix, the language), but Guix suffers from a few shortcomings that make it unsuitable for my needs:
Before I switched from Debian to NixOS, I experimented with Guix for a good few months, and ultimately decided to go with NixOS instead, despite not liking Nix. Guix’s shortcomings were just too severe for my use cases.
NixOS, because:
All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot /persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.
And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programmung work really well together, amg give me immense power.
If any of those end up interacting with me, or I otherwise see them on my timeline, they’ll get treated appropriately: reported, blocked, or in extreme cases, served garbage interactions to. Serving garbage to 500+ bots is laughably easy. Every day I have over 5 million requests from various AI scrapers, from thousands of unique IP addresses, and I serve them garbage. It doesn’t make a blip on my tiny VPS: in just the past 24 hours, I served 5.2M requests from AI scrapers, from ~2100 unique IP addresses, using 60Mb memory and a mere 2.5 hours of CPU time. I can do that on a potato.
But first: they have to interact with me. As I am on a single-user instance, chances are, by the time any bot would get to try and spam me, a bigger server already had them reported and blocked (and I periodically review blocks from larger instances I trust, so there’s a good chance I’d block most bots before they have a chance of interacting with me).
This is not a fight bots can win.
Personally, I do not have any automatism to detect LLMs larping as people. But I do review accounts that follow or interact with mine, and if I find any that are bots, I’ll enact counter measures. That may involve reporting them to their server admin (most instances don’t take kindly to such bots), blocking their entire instance, or in extreme cases, start serving them garbage interactions.
None, because they typicially open up a larger attack surface than the system would have without them. It’s been like that for a while now. For references, I’d recommend this article from Ars Technica, who reference some very knowledgeable people (including Chrome’s Security Chief at the time).
There was a time when AV software was useful. We’re a decade past that, the world has changed, software has changed, defenses have changed, and AV software did not keep up.
Considering the amount of CVEs the kernel puts out, I’d argue there’s plenty there that’s broken, and could be fixed by implementing them in a language less broken than C.
Most GenAI was trained on material they had no right to train on (including plenty of mine). So I’m doing my small part, and serving known AI agents an infinite maze of garbage. They can fuck right off.
Now, if we’re talking about real AI, that isn’t just a server park of disguised markov chains in a trenchcoat, neural networks that weren’t trained on stolen data, that’s a whole different story.
Hungarian: “A nap végén kérlek pakoljátok egymásra a székeket.” (Rough translation back to English: “At the end of the day, I ask you (informal) to stack the chairs on top of each other”).
Same thing, but more formal: “A nap végén kérjük pakolják egymásra a székeket.” (~English: “At the end of the day, we ask you (formatl) to stack the chairs on top of each other”).
In an even more formal / authoritative way: “A nap végén kéretik a székeket egymásra pakolni.” (back to English: “At the end of the day, chairs shall be stacked on top of each other”)