Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer "don't these people have jobs?!?" way, but more ... what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.

A while ago, I started keeping a personal library/journal/etc. using Logseq. I could fire up Logseq in any browser on the planet, connect to my notes, and jot down whatever idea I had in the moment, all in a FOSS journal that stored my notes in plaintext markdown.

Then ... I don't know what happened, but 100% of their effort went into building an app, which then required them to build a (paid, proprietary) sync service, all rather than just releasing a self-hosted build of the web interface so I could spin up my own note-taking server. (Please don't suggest alternatives; I've probably tried them all.) To "preserve privacy" and promote "local first", I had to download an app and rely on a closed-source backend to do something I could trivially accomplish on my own. If my platform doesn't support the app, no notes, unless I rely on the increasingly unmaintained web "demo" that does exactly 100% of what I need from the service, despite dozens of features missing compared to the app version.

But the kicker is that I cannot install things on my work computer. At all. Not portable apps, nothing. I will get a phone call from infosec if I even try, because we are a heavily regulated company. So if I have a bright idea at work, a thought I want to preserve, find a good article, etc., I have to go to another device. I have to interrupt my workflow, change my focus completely, and, probably, lose half of what I wanted to capture.

The thing is, I don't think they're data farming. I think they're running a really good project! Users were begging for an app. "When are you going to release an app?" was a common question forever, because a whole generation of dingleberries cannot be bothered to go to a website that does the same thing, faster, and better than any app.

I have been entertaining myself by reading this post out loud. It sounds like I'm having a stroke over and over.

Looks at M2 macbook running NixOS

Ok maybe I do need help.

My kid, believe it or not, uses a NixOS laptop regularly. He doesn't configure it yet, but honestly I'm not afraid of him having a go. When I was just about his age, I was figuring out DOS without the Internet to help, and while it was orders of a magnitude simpler, the documentation was orders of a magnitude more sparse too. Any of the big, well-documented distros (Ubuntu, Debian, NixOS (for some values of well-documented anyway), Fedora) would be fine. Honestly, I'd even let him loose with Arch at this point, or even Linux From Scratch.

LOL.

Or, rather, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Please stay to the end because it's important, and it's going to be a horrible bait and switch but it's not INTENDED that way. I can't think of another way to present the difficult combination of interests that seem to be driving MS software lately.

I actually quite like Windows 11, and I love Edge when they're doing their core functions. Windows 11 is reasonably solid and useful for normal use. Edge is faster than Chrome and has the best vertical tabs implementation on the planet. Much of the baseline software that Microsoft is putting out has never been better, and is often really good at doing the basic things software should do. I really do feel like the genuine technology people in Microsoft are trying, and often succeeding, to make good technology products.

But... the bottom-feeder marketing drones and MBAs got their hands on them and started layering creepier and creepier nonsense over the top. Mandatory logins to glorified data collection engines. Monetization strategies masquerading as features. Overt advertisement. Heavy-handed promotion of Microsoft's own products. I finally stopped using Edge (on Linux!) when I discovered that just looking at the settings the wrong way would re-enable every intrusive setting imaginable and ditched Windows entirely when I saw the same things creeping into the OS (as well as a general disgust with privately-owned OSes in general). They are destroying trust.

In the great irony of my life, because normally work PC Windows installs have been hot garbage, I have Win11 on a work laptop and it's actually really great to use since all of the intrusive stuff is turned off by our security team. I would still prefer linux or macos (in that order), but as a "forced to use it" option, it's not bad at all. Go back and read that again: it's a pleasant and easy to use OS if all the intrusive marketing functionality is turned off because it presents a security hazard.

PS. Not sacrificing anything being predominantly linux-based and am in fact far, far more efficient on linux (and I am not a programmer or in any other technology role).

So, when we drive up to Georgia or South Carolina from Florida, there's a point on I-75 where the Jesus billboards come out. Many of them are the usual "Babies have heartbeats" variety, but there's also the following:

• "Have you decided yet ... Jesus" which we always render in an exasperated voice, aka "OMG have you decided yet? Jesus!"
• "Go ahead, let go. I'll catch you - Jesus" which we always respond to with "WTF Jesus just reach down and grab me, you're RIGHT THERE!"
• "Jesus is in control" with mysterious Russian tanks and American soldiers.
• Zombies and Jesus for ... reasons.

The thing I've learned in the many years of watching this fight is that the things Gnome people (of which I am one, though I have immense respect and appreciation for the KDE project) don't like about KDE tend to be the things KDE people like about KDE and vice versa.

Zed has a lot more features and is GUI-based. Helix is more focused and is CLI-based. I think a more direct comparison would be with VSCode(ium).

I am similarly cis gender, straight male (much to my more fluid spouse's amusement and dismay). I've just found the fem- voice actors to be better. Femshep, the female lead in Ghost Recon Wildlands, etc. Or maybe it's that the brah actors for the male characters sound so consistently dumb. And now it's just a thing I do.

PS. I hope you love yourself.

11 months later …

NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp

I’m still saucy (in magnitude, bechamel not mole) that the version numbering is yy.n (24.2) and not yy.nn (24.02). The actual versioning combines the “was there a version .1?” problem with a sorting issue if there’s both 24.2 and 24.10.

I look back on learning to live with NixOS and laugh. It made my brain hurt, and if I'd only found the Misterio77 repo sooner, it would've saved a lot of premature aging. But, if you have some basic familiarity with programming concepts, it's an easy OS to live with, just different. And so, so, so, so powerful.

They do desperately need a set of opinionated example builds and much better documentation.

Yeah, I will definitely try another live iso. The ONLY possible lead I have is that in btop there's a .gnome-session entry that pops to the top of the list when the pause happens, but (a) the peak displayed CPU usage is like 10%, and (b) I can't figure out what it is. So I'm going to try both a KDE session and maybe a new user just to see if there might be something config-related. Though, again, I didn't change anything in my nix config.

Part of my issue is that I'm not even sure how to describe what's happening to search to see if it's a known issue in recent kernels, gnome, etc. I keep descending into insane metaphors, like "it's sort of like when the cat is about to throw up a hairball and everything pauses while the horror unfolds in front of you."

Git integration seems to be so embedded that it's easy to miss. Open a git repository folder and you can switch branches and whatnot. But, like, in the command palette, there's no Git > Pull or Git > Clone as in vscode. (I have barely scratched the surface so it might be there hiding in plain sight.)

I think about it like this:

Layer 2b: ->> User applications (flatpak, nixpkgs, etc.)

Layer 2a: ->> User data (mutable, persistent no matter what your system layer is)

Layer 1: -> System (immutable/read-only/updated "atomically" meaning all at once) 

Layer 0: Hardware

Or, alternately, it's what macos has been doing with absolutely no fanfare for several versions now. That's not a knock, btw. It's an illustration that it can be completely transparent in use, though it may require some habit changes on linux.

And that's without counting the roll-your-own variants. uBlue has been a remarkable project.

Let me give an example: I have a friend on Bluesky. He's as middle of the road as it's possible to be (and I say that in an entirely neutral way; it makes him neither better nor worse than anyone). He's nice, and a good person. But he's aggressive, disruptive, a fight-picker, and a single-issue conversationalist on social media. Bluesky seems to have a disproportionate number of people who are very nice, well-meaning, but aggressive and disruptive. I left Bluesky to exit an echo chamber for something more serene. I think that's one thing the loud folk don't quite get, regardless of their ideology: not all of us are here to yell and throw things all the time.

First, I don't disagree with that, but I'm always conflicted. Like, eza is better than ls. Atuin is magic history search. btop/fish/helix etc. etc. etc. But for just getting started I almost want to discourage finding alternative tools. But I also don't lol.

Also, I am 99.9% certain this exchange is how most distros get started. "We can do a more sensible set of defaults!"

Integrated laptop keyboard (so I assume USB under the hood?)

Oh, no, it's exactly that. "If you let one Nazi into the bar, congrats you have a Nazi bar."

The repeating is a symptom, and the system pause/stutter/whatever is still happening regardless. I thought about it just as a sanity play, but I'd rather fix the underlying issue.

Day 1: Sway looks cool Day 11: SwayFX looks cooler Day 29: Hyprland looks wild Day 44: niri looks fun Day 63: This WM I found on a repo by a random Serbian guy looks great. Day 97: I WROTE MY OWN WAYLAND COMPOSITOR AND WINDOW MANAGEMENT CONCEPT FROM SCRATCH

It appears to be a couple of versions behind ... and have some issues with dynamically linked libraries that hinder LSPs. Neither of these is Zed's fault. I'm sure the packaged version will be up to date momentarily (given the interest in Zed, sooner rather than later). Not sure how easy the LSP thing will be to fix, though there are some workarounds in the github issue.

I mean, a liter is very close to a quart, so it's not like we'd be asking people to adjust their mindset completely. And ditching US measures means we could finally, once and for all, dispense with the nonsense of having a dry and a wet "cup" measure.

As for converting records, well, it would be trivial to display a converted value in whatever EMR system a practice uses while noting the values are converted and allowing display of the uncoverted data for validation. (Which brings us to the EMR discussion.)

NixOS on an M2 Air here. Works fine, other than the fingerprint reader.

The 2016-2017 MBP are unusually bad. Devices on either side of that? You're fine. But the 2016-2017 devices? No wifi (except in some extremely unusual cases) is the big problem. Even then, it amazes me how much does work, with zero configuration, with a simple graphical install. The problem with this vintage MBP isn't that it's hard to get running--it's that it's (almost) impossible, but the parts that aren't impossible are as smooth as they can be.

Yes, that's cold comfort. But I'm speaking from the POV of an owner of a 2017 MBP who desperately wanted to keep it going.

The coda to the story is that my wife used it for a while with her business but it fell victim to an absolutely bizarre heat issue where the heat sink vents hot air directly across the controller cable for the display, leading to inevitable failure. Again: not an issue on either side of this model year. It's sad because it could've served for another 4-5 years, making the initial purchase price substantially more tolerable.

Apple IIc > Windows 3.1 > Windows 95 > Windows 98 > Windows XP > Brief experiment with Ubuntu in the REALLY purple and brown era > OS X > Elementary > Fedora > Endeavour > Fedora > Silverblue > ublue > NixOS

(not counting numerous VMs with everything from Debian to Linux From Scratch)

That’s pretty much how I got where I am. Started with Fedora, then Silverblue, then Ublue, then fleek (a custom front end for Home Manager), then, when I saw what Home Manager and Nix could do, dove into NixOS fully.

It seems to still be strongly gnome-adjacent, which fits with the softer, "calmer" aesthetic Pop has, but with functional tweaks that are more aligned with Win11/KDE (absolutely intended as a positive statement, as far as moving the ball forward on UX design). I worry that team KDE won't like the "sane defaults" simplicity that it appears to have inherited from the gnome days, but that might just be the part of me that experiences terminal choice paralysis every time I fire up KDE. :)

My wife and I have a saying we find ourselves using far, FAR too often: “Conservatism lurks in the most unexpected places…”

If that’s the case, I’m less saucy, but my understanding was that the numbers were based on the release month. (Noting for emphasis that I cannot overstate the absolutely minimal nature of my irritation and that it doesn’t detract even a whisker from my appreciation of Libreoffice! It’s almost, but not quite, tongue in cheek.)

Congrats! My native youtube RSS feeds are mostly 404 or access forbidden, depending on the day, as are many others'.

It's a great suggestion (even kidding -- though Doc Brown asking about the strength of gravity in the future crossed my mind), but that's exactly why I don't think it's a hardware issue. It's going to end up being some weird kernel/gnome conflict triggered by one specific flatpak.

You're right, but it's pretty horrendous typing in this environment so it slipped my mind.

Intel® Core™ i7-10610U 16GB Intel® UHD Graphics Gnome/Wayland NixOS 23.11 kernel 6.1.57

My kid (not even a teenager) uses Linux daily. And not in a coy "he's using a chromebook" way. He's using full-blown NixOS on a laptop I set up for him. Could he have set it up? No, but he's a child. Has day to day use presented him with any difficulties whatsoever? Nope. He figured out gnome purely by instinct in a day. He goes between macos and windows and linux effortlessly, because he's a reasonably intelligent human being.

But, yes, half the time the "linux is hard" crowd seem to be basing their evaluation on things you would rarely do on a mac or windows machine. These days, install Mint, Fedora, or, hell, even Nixos or Endeavor, choose the defaults, and you will very likely have a perfectly usable, intuitive system.

Darktable has an astonishingly odd UI. It's a very, very powerful piece of software, but the workflow and assumptions are unlike any other software tool I've used. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you're looking to make a few luminosity adjustments as in Lightroom, it's going to feel alien. RawTherapee isn't, I suppose, as powerful at the top end, but it's much more accessible initially.

You might also want to look at Rapid Photo Downloader for easy and consistent photo importing to the filesystem.

Obsidian, logseq, and others work natively with markdown files that are almost cross-compatible and can be edited and used in any text editor. Things like back linking may not be present in that case (of using a plain text editor) but it doesn’t disappear from the file.

Roam uses a proprietary format but exports to markdown.

It appears that it is. The first version, February-based, is 24.2. The next scheduled version is 24.8, scheduled for release in August.