Ummm… true. I’ll go ‘true’. Might’ve heard that one before, though, to be honest, sort of cheating

Face it, Linux is just the kernel. You use systemd as your operating system.

On other distros I don’t have to read the wiki to look up the syntax of installing nvidia drivers, or rustup, or neovim, or home-manager (the package manager that lets me install programs as a user The NixOS Way™ and if you use nix-env instead you’re doing it wrong (the instructions on the wiki for installing home-manager do not work anymore, and also involve nix-channels which you are apparently never supposed to use ever, and even after managing to get it installed and reading 3 articles about it I am still not sure what it does)) because no two of those are installed the same way

You forgot to put Windows 10 in “Maliciously Bad”

You will use Windows 11 or you will not use Windows at all

Me either but I’m tired of clearing my schedule to read wiki pages every time I want to make any change to my configuration

You spelled NixOS wrong

Another day of GNOME developers doing everything they can to convince me I made the right choice sticking with Plasma

What DE/WM do you use? Works great for me on Plasma.

I’m currently using Plasma Wayland on Arch with the 1080p monitor built into my laptop and an external 4K monitor right next to it at 175%, and it works flawlessly. When a window is half on one monitor and half on the other it actually looks how it’s supposed to. I can drag a window back and forth between the monitors and watch it rescale itself to run at that monitor’s native resolution. Some apps, you don’t even see the transition. The current scale is passed through to the applications, so text looks nice and sharp.

Yes. You can specify tar -C somedir if you want it to extract them somewhere else.

As a rule of thumb, I always extract my tarballs in a newly created, empty directory, just in case whoever packed it didn’t put all its files in a subdir

They really, really aren’t. Let’s take a look at this command together:

curl -L [some url goes here] | tar -xz

Sorry the formatting’s a bit messy, Lemmy’s not having a good day today

This command will start to extract the tar file while it is being downloaded, saving both time (since you don’t have to wait for the entire file to finish downloading before you start the extraction) and disk space (since you don’t have to store the .tar file on disk, even temporarily).

Let’s break down what these scary-looking command line flags do. They aren’t so scary once you get used to them, though. We’re not scared of the command line. What are we, Windows users?

• curl -L – tells curl to follow 3XX redirects (which it does not do by default – if the URL you paste into cURL is a URL that redirects (GitHub release links famously do), and you don’t specify -L, it’ll spit out the HTML of the redirect page, which browsers never normally show)
• tar -x – eXtract the tar file (other tar “command” flags, of which you must specify exactly one, include -c for Creating a tar file, and -t for Testing a tar file (i.e. listing all of the filenames in it and making sure their checksums are okay))
• tar -z – tells tar that its input is gzip compressed (the default is not compressed at all, which with tar is an option) – you can also use -j for bzip2 and -J for xz
• tar -f which you may be familiar with but which we don’t use here – -f tells tar which file you want it to read from (or write to, if you’re creating a file). tar -xf somefile.tar will extract from somefile.tar. If you don’t specify -f at all, as we do here, tar will default to reading the file from stdin (or writing a tar file to stdout if you told it to create). tar -xf somefile.tar (or tar -xzf somefile.tar.gz if your file is gzipped) is exactly equivalent to cat somefile.tar.gz | tar -xz (or tar -xz < somefile.tar – why use cat to do something your shell has built-in?)
• tar -v which you may be familiar with but which we don’t use here – tells tar to print each filename as it extracts the file. If you want to do this, you can, but I’d recommend telling curl to shut up so it doesn’t mess up the terminal trying to show download progress also: curl -L --silent [your URL] | tar -xvz (or -xzv, tar doesn’t care about the order)

You may have noticed also that in the first command I showed, I didn’t put a - in front of the arguments to tar. This is because the tar command is so old that it takes its arguments BSD style, and will interpret its first argument as a set of flags regardless of whether there’s a dash in front of them or not. tar -xz and tar xz are exactly equivalent. tar does not care.

If you download and extract the tarball as two separate steps instead of piping curl directly into tar xz (for gzip) / tar xj (for bz2) / tar xJ (for xz), are you even a Linux user?

deleted by creator

Well first off, if you’re building a NAS, build it out of drives that are rated for NAS use. Seagate’s IronWolf line is a bit pricier than their BarraCuda but has better transfer speeds and (more importantly) better resiliency to vibration, which is important if you’re putting a half dozen drives in the same enclosure and don’t want them to fail prematurely.

I recently tried switching from Arch to NixOS and the experience I had can best be described as apalling. I have not had a new user experience this bad since my first dip into Ubuntu dependency hell back in 2016. I’d like to preface this by saying I’ve been a Linux user in one form or another for almost half my life at this point, and in that time this may well be the most I’ve struggled to get things to work.

Apparently they have this thing called home-manager which looks pretty cool. I’d like to give that a shot. Apparently I have to enable a new Nix channel before I can install it. I’m guessing that’s the equivalent of a PPA? Well, alright. nix-channel --add ..., nix-channel --update (oh, so it waits until now to tell me I typo’d the URL. Alright), and now to run the installation command and… couldn’t find home-manager? Huh?? I just installed it. I google the error message and apparently you have to reboot after adding a new nix-channel and doing nix-channel --update before it will actually take effect, and the home-manager guide didn’t tell me that. Ah well, at least it works now.

I didn’t want to wait for KDE and its 6 morbillion dependencies to download, so I opted for Weston. It wasn’t a thing in configuration.nix (programs.weston.enable=true; threw an error and there was no page for it on the NixOS wiki), but it was available in nix-env (side note: why does nix-env -i take upwards of 30 seconds just to locate a package?), so I installed it, tried to run it, and promptly got an inscrutable “Permission denied” error with one Google result that had gone unresolved. Oh well, that’s alright, I guess that’s not supported just yet – I’ll install Sway instead. Great, now I have a GUI and all I need is a browser. nix-env -i firefox gave me the firefox-beta binary which displayed the crash reporter before even opening a browser window. Okay, note to self: always use configuration.nix. One programs.firefox.enable=true; and one nixos-rebuild switch later, I’m off to the races. Browser is up and running. Success! Now I’d like to install a Rust development environment so I can get back to work. According to NixOS wiki, I can copy paste this incantation into a shell.nix file and have rustup in there. Cool. After resolving a few minor hangups regarding compiler version, manually telling rustc where the linker is, and telling nix-shell that I also need cmake (which was thankfully pretty easy), I’m met with a “missing pkg-config file for openssl” error that I have absolutely no idea how to begin to resolve.

I’m trying to stick with it, I really am – I love the idea that I can just copy my entire configuration to a brand new install by copying one file and the contents of my home directory and have it be effectively the same machine – but I’m really struggling here. Surely people wouldn’t rave about NixOS as much as they do if it was really this bad? What am I doing wrong?

Also unrelated but am I correct in assuming that I cannot install KDE without also installing the X server?

like you are aware that overwriting the file you opened, as opposed to saving a project file, is what I just told you how to do in 5 clicks?

Yes, that is what those steps do

wait hyprland is banned from freedesktop? what???

the fuck do you mean “it’s more like” i just reproduced those 5 steps using my copy of gimp

(step 2) save it and close GIMP under 10 clicks.

File -> Overwrite (2 clicks)

File -> Quit (2 clicks)

Yes I want to quit, even though I haven’t saved it as an .xpf file (1 click)

Total: 5 clicks