Was sagt dein Zahnartzt dazu?
How much is "fairly long"?
What do you know about the password?
They're still unstable and fully optional. When you're at the point where you could benefit from flakes, you'll know it. Ignore them for now.
The most tangible difference to a NixOS user would be that they replace channels. If you're contempt with channels, no need to rush to flakes.
Any package can be "edited" using its overrideDerivation function. You can pass new configureFlags, buildInputs, a new src, etc. It's all additive too, so when something else about the package changes in Nixpkgs, that'll propagate to your "edited" package too.
Config files for some service at runtime and the packages themselves are two separate domains. The former is handled by NixOS. In order to "modify" the runtime configuration, you set options inside a NixOS module such as your configuration.nix. If you wanted to place a config file somewhere in /etc/ or configure a systemd service, you'd use the environment.etc or systemd.services options. They're a bit like "primitives" as they're rather low-level in NixOS terms but so is editing a config file in an imperative distro. NixOS modules usually use these "primitives" internally to offer more abstract options. services.paperless.enable internally sets up a systemd service via systemd.services which runs paperless with the declared configuration for example.
what if a package’s dependencies are out of date?
This is rarely the case as we usually don't keep older patch versions or whatever. Most packages will just be updated "in-place". We might keep a few major versions of some major packages though if some other packages have a hard dependency on some older API/ABI. When that happens and an old major version goes EOL/has security issues, it's marked as insecure and you'd have to explicitly opt into using it by allowing its version in your config.
it’s (nearly) impossible to actually do your own manual imperative editing of packages to solve a quick problem since everything is declarative.
You can do your own declarative "editing" of packages: Overrides allow you to override any dependency of a package and receive a package where that dependency is the other thing you put in.
Overlays allow you to "edit" packages in the context of a package set where the package's dependants in the set also receive the "edited" package as their dependency.
It's fairly normal to have an overlay in your config to customise a few packages to your liking. Anything that needs youtube-dl gets yt-dlp with the youtube-dl executable alias in mine for example: https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/b79f42793a709db083cf53867f85d5d46e41eb69/overlays.nix#L29-L33. Stuff like that.
Also note that, if a package is broken, it's usually best to fix it upstream rather than patching around upstream in your own config. The package being unbroken for every NixOS user instead of just yourself is one PR away; it's super easy to contribute to Nixpkgs.
Nix uses mostly its own configuration methodology, so isn’t this a maintenance nightmare as config files change and options are added/removed?
In NixOS, this doesn't happen very often. Most options have been there for years and go unchanged for years aswell. At least in terms of API; they might do different things internally to achieve the options' goal but you don't need to care about that; you just state your intent. There are many ways to install i.e. systemd-boot to your ESP but you only care that it's installed, not how.
When a breaking change happens in the options' API, you'll know about it at eval time. It'll show you an error stating that e.g. the option has been renamed to so and so and perhaps the semantics changed. Many times it'll just be an eval warning even, stating that the option has been renamed and has been set to your old option's value but you should move over because this fall-back will be removed in the next release.
Note that if you don't like breaking changes coming in willy-nilly, the stable channel (23.05 currently) would be for you: It restricts such option changes and you only have to change your config to accommodate option changes twice a year when a new release comes out. As I said though, breaking changes don't happen very often for your average NixOS config even on the unstable channel. This isn't really as much of an issue as you might think.
Can't really speak for home-manager as my use of it is quite limited and it's a nix-community project, not a NixOS one (different quality standards).
I have come to the realiziation that, unlike a traditional distro like Arch/Alpine which I used previously, if maintenance dies I cannot feasibly maintain it myself, since it's mostly "magic".
That's just because you don't have experience packaging or maintaining Nix packages yet. If you didn't know how to package Arch/Alpine packages, you would be just as screwed if maintenance was dropped.
Once you've done a few patches to packages or even packaged something yourself, this "magic" will become more and more disenchanted.
The upkeep of all the configurations plus all the dependency packages, and making sure each package compiles and matches the build configuration is a nightmare.
Not quite sure what you mean here. Could you point out some concrete examples of that?
How could you save a png then?
A PNG of what? Copyrighted material? Depending on what you want to do with it (fair use, private copies in some places) or whether you have a license and perhaps a select few other factors, you would not be allowed to download a PNG of copyrighted material.
where you can absolutely copy a file without facing any legal repercussions for doing so.
The law and its enforcement are two separate topics. I don't really care to discuss the latter.
Its also not illegal for humans to learn from the art of someone else and then create similar art.
Depends on how similar it is. If the work the human does to the original is transformative in some way, that falls under fair use and therefore legal. If they just apply some instagram filter or something, that would likely not be considered transformative and distribution would not be legal without permission of the copyright holder.
This is the crux in all of this imitative AI art discussion. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work and (closely related) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
Either through profiting from it or by posting that content online.
Note that profit has no influence in any of this except for making the infringing party more noticeable to law enforcement. The law itself does not care whether you make a profit out of a copyright infringement or not.
You think tracing for educational use which is then never distributed such that it could not have a negative impact on market value is infringement?
That's not what I think, that's what the law says.
I said what I think in the second paragraph. Sorry if I wasn't being extra clear on that.
What the generative AI field needs moving forward is a copyright discriminator that identifies infringing production of new images.
Good luck with that.
But I’ll be surprised if cases claiming infringement on training in and of itself end up successful under current laws.
Depends. If the imitative AI imitates its source material too closely, that could absolutely be laid out as a distribution of copyrighted material.
Think about it like this: If I distributed a tarball of copyrighted material, that would be infringement, eventhough you'd need tar to unpack it. Whether you need a transformer or tar to access the material should make no difference in my layman interpretation.
You aren't a reputable public hoster with AWS-class uptime. That has a price too. AWS is likely overpriced though, hence the nix community still looking for better alternatives.
the Nix community is still looking into more sustainable long-term solutions.
Not if Amazon can cheat itself out of those regulations that is.
You did not specify that you need a 10-bit capable decoder. Given that the screen is 8-bit, that would be kind of unusual to have outside of niche applications such as this one.
8 vs. 10 bit shouldn't make the image look better outside of toning down banding artefacts. There might be an indirect colour transformation taking place here.
If that's all random characters, you're not going to crack that by brute force in your lifetime.