Thanks. I’ve successfully “upstreamed” some of my patches to some courses, but sadly still most of the education is Visual Studio-based. It’s good to see more people in the new years contacting me after asking teachers about Linux and being given my name for help, but of course I want this to be a base part of the curriculum!

I did a bachelor of videogame programming in Belgium 99% on Linux (minus exams), but it was definitely a huge struggle. All the courses and assignments were Windows-only, and 90%-ish required Visual Studio (non-Code) and Windows-only libraries like DirectX or Win32. I got by writing my own tooling to auto-convert these to CMake projects and convincing each teacher to allow me to hand in CMake projects. I wrote SDL backends for most of the win32 assignments, falling back on clang’s excellent cross-compiling for stuff that requires e.g Windows.h. I wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.allpurposem.at/adventures-cross-compiling-a-windows-game-engine And using e.g DirectX natively on Linux, easier than expected: https://blog.allpurposem.at/directx

I also wrote a small wiki on my general experience + a summary of courses and main problems encountered… Windows was non-negotiable during exams: https://dae-linux.allpurposem.at/ I maintain tools, converted assignments, and information on this for future students who want to attempt something like me, but it’s hard to recommend the Linux challenge if you are totally new to programming!

Hope some of this is helpful!

This is very cool! I’ll definitely use it if it gets a Nix package.

Found out just now he made a video about it and explained his actual experience using it, it’s really cool! Glad to see more folks sharing this stuff.

Awesome! I hope he will help share this with more folks, the friends who I’ve talked into finally giving modern non-Ubuntu Linux a shot love it, but there’s a lot of work to get over the damaged image created by the countless “linux user installing a browser” memes. I’m sure someone with his reach can help though :)

I dual booted Ubuntu originally, but I never used it. Had to really make the jump when I installed Arch on my desktop in ~2020 because I heard it would run games better. I’ve stayed 100% on Linux since! After trying quite a few distros (Fedora, Debian, EndeavourOS, Garuda, Archcraft, more I’m forgetting) I have finally settled on NixOS… it’s been over a year and I still haven’t switched, that’s gotta be worth something :)

Never heard of FuriLabs, looks really cool. How open is the OS/hardware? Could be my next phone… though I’d love to see an immutable approach so I can’t be left with a broken system after an update.

The article is good, however I’d really appreciate having fedi-style content warnings on AI-generated images. I don’t interact with mainstream social mediums so I generally do not see it, however in the thumbnail and contents of the article there are some quite disturbing images and videos that I’d have chosen not to see (description is enough) given the choice…

Good news!

Good point… I tend to give family members Flatpak-based distros like Fedora for the nice app store experience, but I guess if you can get past the scaryness of test editing and rebuilding with a console, NixOS does come with the benefit of having waaaay more packages and much easier rollback. My poor father trying to run nvidia drivers on Fedora Kinoite, who has to rebuild the kernel for every package install…

Does your wife install packages with NixOS? This is one of the few distros I tried (and now main) that I genuinely cannot recommend to anyone not willing to spend days learning the lang & concepts.

Have you asked whether they’d be okay with a dual-boot? I recently started work as well (gamedev) and while most of the studio is on Windows I was able to set up a NixOS install for productivity (and to test the game on more configs).

I like this picture of a cat that shows up every time this repo is linked. Good things are to come when this cat appears on my feed.

Awesome! I now know the next show we’ll watch when we finally coordinate to finish Breaking Bad off my Jellyfin instance :)

(unrelated to piracy, though I agree with the main point of the post) I loved Le Bureau des Légendes! Are these shows well-subtitled/dubbed? That’s what prevents me from sharing them with my English-speaking friends usually, the language barrier is too great and it’s not as usual to watch a subtitled French show than a kdrama f.e

The “immutable” type of distros could be worth a shot. They don’t let you break the system and if anything does break, you can undo it with a reboot, so they tend to be pretty stable. My family runs a few flavors of Universal Blue, which are based on Fedora and hasn’t broken for them, but I don’t know the exact hardware. I’ve been running NixOS (also immutable) on a Framework 16 since the laptop came out, I can’t count a single hardware issue I encountered. However, NixOS does come with a steep learning curve, so it’s hard to recommend, and it also has trouble running software that hasn’t been already packaged for it.

Genuinely curious, how do they update? My server (ubuntu) yells at me every time I ssh in to reboot “as soon as possible” because “livepatch has fixed vulnerabilities”. So if you don’t reboot, you don’t get kernel updates, and your server becomes vulnerable?

My parents run a business, and besides having me install it and do the initial setup, they both use Linux fine and have adjusted great from their previous machines. I moved them to it mainly because of performance and being tired of fixing printers on Windows. LibreOffice runs, Firefox runs, a video editor works, and OBS runs, so it’s enough for their use. They’re both on Wayland, one on EndeavourOS (w/ a graphical app store set up ofc) and the other on Fedora Kinoite, w/ nouveau drivers and no issues so far!

My cybersecurity course uses Linux… in a VM. We boot into Windows 10, then start Kali in VMware and do everything inside of it. I still don’t know why, I just bring my own laptop with NixOS and add whichever package we are using to my shell.nix for that course.

My Ubuntu server (which has been working for a few years now) recently asked me in a full-screen prompt while updating something about GRUB. There was a list of partitions with just one element, which is the partition that GRUB os on. I was focused on something else so I just hit enter, but now I am really scared to reboot it. Is there any way to pull this back up or to double-check that everything is ok with the machine?