cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7066703
Like I hear a lot of people trying a lot of different distros till they find the one they stick with.
Is there a point in Distro hopping ? Like assuming im mostly content with my Mint. Have been using it for about 10 days now.
Ofc Im curious about Desktop enviroments for example. Cinnamon is nice if a bit basic. But beyond that am I missing out on some cool stuff :3
Sorry if this a babys first Linux question.
Mostly the distro doesn’t make nearly as much difference to your experience as what desktop environment you are using. The package manager is the biggest difference. If you like a distro just stick with it. Maybe if you refresh your computer choose a different one for kicks. Or if you’re very technically inclined check out NixOS or something else weird like that.
IIRC it’s more or less run by Palantir.
Would not say that necessarily. Their employees do have a fair amount of influence in the community, despite vocal protests. Also it might be Anduril I don’t remember which evil Tolkien-themed weapons company it is.
Oh my god, you’re right, it might be Anduril.
It’s pretty clear that there’s financial and political forces at play here that mean that this will never be fixed, though. Likely (hopefully) it will split at some point and a fork will take all the non-Hitlerite users and developers.
nixos was built by functional programming academics and trans people and some undue influence because some early hitlerite at a hip VC-funded shop sold his boss on paying him to be a maintainer won’t change that. nix isn’t a complementary good to the war machine the way red hat was to data center hosting, it’s a novel package manager, DSL and OS that’s like catnip for brogrammers.
we’ve got https://lix.systems/ which is probably the birth of that fork, but also eventually a bean counter at the death factory will look at what they’re paying the nerds to do and fire that whole team
It’s more nuanced than that. The inventor of Nix, Eelco dolstra, is actually a terrible person who went all in on his terribly designed “flakes” project subsystem which he built directly into the language. Flakes are
represented in code form (literally just thin wrappers built into the Nix language that you can emulate in like an evening and this shit WENT ON FOR 5+ FUCKING YEARS)
This, imo, started the stagnation of the community as Dolstra was trying to sell flakes to as many enterprises as he could and disengaged from the actual community. Eventually he got short-circuited by the Lix people who forced the CppNix team to actually implement useful things and not features for Dolstra’s shitty VC funded company. NixOS is not Nix which is not Nixpkgs. Eventually, anduril realized it could just hire Nix people they liked who would give them undue influence over the project due to the advantage of actually being paid. The “leadership” decided to do a Europe and tackle this with electoralism (which then elected all the shitty people who caused the problem).
In that process, a lot of people got burnt out and lost faith in the project. A recent Nix community survey listed the majority of the community identifying as men and if you go on the NixOS discourse instance you get slammed with hitler particles and VC companies advertising ai slop or their new hiring bid (or people help begging on stuff that was caused by the stagnation of flakes).
Lix and Floral (a potential working group for a fork of nixpkgs) are the only things keeping me on this project.
had the same experience on their matrix in like 2017 so I’m not surprised, but the VC piece is new. ty for the context, I don’t have a flakes opinion but good to know about the creator
my point about the bean counters is still relevant. there is nothing in the nix ecosystem that provides a complementary good to weapons manufacturing, so eventually whatever nerd at anduril who’s obsessed with nix will be cowed by capital. this isn’t an AWS/RHEL situation
It really does feel like any nix nerd who works at these companies are just obsessed with the project. The pattern is that they all believe that nix is going to revolutionize everything and so whatever horror they help with is actually a net positive. It’ll all go away once those people leave so thats why they buy into crapware like flakes.
The company is called Determinate Systems and they’ve made it not so subtle that they’re trying to rugpull people onto their nix implementation with flakes to boost their product. Their nix stuff is even proprietary, like legit nonfee.
Flakes were actually a relatively new thing surprisingly. They got shipped as part of a huge nix “overhaul” that subsequently was one of the worst releases in the projects history.
Theres so much drama in a package manager you wouldn’t believe it.
I love learning the fact there are multiple evil companies named after Tolkiens fantasy words.
meme of guy missing the point of media
“Ah the problem is that a ‘bad guy’ had the ring - if I had endless power - well - that’d just be sick 😎”
My god. I forget there’s an emote for everything
There’s also this version
Emojis :)
wow socialism! 
Not technically true, the anduril employees and VC vultures are in the steering council, but the thing is that the SC itself is organized horribly and doesn’t do anything useful, so their influence is actually just being losers and not having any good ideas.
The NixOS foundation is also a skeleton crew of like, half a dozen people (being incredibly generous it’s probably just 2 people) who you will never know and don’t interact with. They also have no moderators because the community is mostly made up of cis-men who enjoy anti-woke crusades.
Really, the political economy of NixOS is GitHub Actions and AWS S3 buckets and the legion of unpaid, burnt out volunteers. NixOS has no real funding model or compensation.
Oh okay, that makes sense that Anduril hitlerites dont have that much control in practi-
lmao, “open source” (free software minus any political consciousness) was a mistake.
The moderator purge started because they thought one of the moderators was too woke (EU liberalism is too woke) and then tried to sneakily replace them with a hitlerite techbro. It was a battle between liberals in the US and liberals in the EU after electoralism reproduced the same crisis.
All the moderators mass resigned when they realized what was happening. Of course, the NixOS “community” doesnt feel phased because it was already a Nazi bar.