The average Linux user definitely will not care about reproducibility.

I think a lot of people do care about it, just not under that name. But I think a lot of users asked themselves at least once “what did I do back then to achieve X”. Not in that the whole system is reproduced 1:1, but certain aspects. That’s something much easier to answer with nix.

Well, you don’t need to learn nix as a programming language for a simple installation, you can use it like a slightly different json, which the configuration.nix part was about. You can get the reproducibility aspect from just that, so I wouldn’t say you get no benefits at all without learning the language.

There are more disadvantages (like time required to rebuild because you added a single package), so Arch is the better choice depending on preferences. Arch is a very good traditional distribution in my opinion, can’t go wrong with it

Arch is easier in my opinion, at least if you want to leverage the power NixOS can offer. A simple /etc/nixos/configuration.nix maybe not, but once you enter custom options / submodule territory and use stuff like lib.mapAttrs, I’d say NixOS is quite harder. Or just a more complex overrideAttrs. But then again, Arch doesn’t have an equivalent to that…

Bonfire itself is a framework that implemented ActivityPub, on it you can build applications that make use of it without developing from the ground up. Bonfire Social is a social network similar to Mastodon. Collaboration is is about project management etc and allows one to host their own, but integrate with others, e.g. to synchronize milestones via federation. What they have in common is that both build on Bonfire and as such use the same protocol for federation. But they’re tools for very different jobs.

No issues here, but I haven’t benchmarked anything and any improvement could be placebo. It’s trivial with flakes

You probably know this, but you can even run the CachyOS kernel on NixOS. Currently doing exactly that

Similarly here. Have an Odroid with that platform, it wasn’t cheap but it came with several advantages:

• 4 SATA ports on addition to the M2 slot
• Intel QSV
• 2 x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet (I only have gigabit at home though)

Very powerful machine for the power usage, I ran a really old Athlon before though (from 2010 or so that I retrofitted with 16GB RAM) that did most stuff just fine. But I wanted some transcoding and also possibly a smaller case.

I run everything bare metal though.

Luckily, it’s not the entire Internet, just the unfun part.

While there is quite the push thanks to Valve, they built upon the work of others, mostly Wine (which I think they fund nowadays) and DXVK (they hired the dev after a short while). So they’re definitely not freeloading, but the main lifting has been done by Codeweavers and Wine contributors through their massive work over the years, plus the quantum leap that was DXVK.

I’m not trying to shame Valve here, they definitely go beyond what they’d be required to by license, but I feel it’s also not fair to call them the reason most games work under Linux when others have poured literal years of work into making it possible.

It’s too funny to me that Arch of all distributions attracts the thigh /Unix socks crowd (for lack of better word). Nothing about Arch stands out for me in that regard, there’s no social statement or anything, and when I was more active in the community, it wasn’t known for that.

I was deep enough into Arch to run my own private repository using aurutils, but no thighs :(

It doesn’t really do a lot for most people since you just skip UEFI initialization, which yeah does save a lot of time but you still need to restart all your processes

I think an Apple machine will set you back slightly more than a League capable Windows 11 machine

Yeah, this wasn’t about whether they’re screwing the customers - they are - but about whether this has any negative financial implications for them

unless you’re running one of the Enterprise/IoT SKUs…

That is the whole point. They’re squeezing the users they don’t give a shit about. But personal users almost never buy Windows licenses from Microsoft I’d bet. So what if they switch away? And how are they or their kids going to play Fortnite or League after switching?

The money for Windows non-Enterprise is made with OEM deals. They probably wouldn’t even notice if nobody bought personal licenses anymore. Might as well make actual money from selling data about them.

Enterprise is a different story, once you squeeze too hard, companies will find ways to replace you; they are somewhat resilient to pain, but it does have limits.

Just because it doesn’t offer features a database has doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to use it as one

I support your argument, but unfortunately there are some real monstrosities out there that have carried small businesses since decades

NixOS’ (which I ended up using) solution requires custom keys.

It was a contender when I switched, but its lack of Secure Boot options unfortunately disqualified it.

I actually considered it once. It failed in a VM but I probably tried too much fancy stuff at once (like replacing OpenSSL…)

To be expected, difficulty of Arch installation was always overblown, and Gentoo doesn’t have an installer either, but you need to handle stage tarballs while in Arch, you just used pacman

People are hating on Powershell way too much. I don’t like its syntax really but it has a messy better approach to handling data in the terminal. We have nu and elvish nowadays but MS was really early with the concept and I think they learned from the shortcomings of POSIX compatible shells.