mrh

joined 2 years ago
2
Subterranean - Cerebral Internment (subterraneandoom.bandcamp.com)
 

Beware! Here be core influences. But don't worry, I don't like core ifluences, and I like this, therefore it must be good.

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 2 points 2 years ago

Interesting, what made you switch? I’ve never used nix but they are very similar.

Care to point me towards these lemmy guix posts?

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 4 points 2 years ago

Yep! If you're applying and need a non-trivial number of locations checked/maps generated, you can check out the prgoram here.

Note that it says you can install it with guix, but it hasn't actually been merged into master yet, so for now you do need sbcl and the dependencies (etiher via quicklisp or however else you snag them).

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 2 points 2 years ago

Yep thanks that's exactly what I ended up doing! In my case it was easiest to work with Map Text Text.

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You can mount any directory you want as the “home” directory of a given container with distrobox, it just defaults to using your home directory.

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 5 points 2 years ago

firmware/drivers

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Thanks for the response! Flathub is a fantastic project so glad to hear about your contributions. Your videos have been helpful for me as introductions to Silvelblue ideas and statuses.

I don't have much to say about the term "cloud native" personally, it doesn't seem too important. I think myself and others react against it because cloud tech is mostly used by businesses and "server people" to deliver products (sometimes at the cost of user freedom), and so has either a non or negative connotation in the FOSS linux desktop space. But names are names, and accuracy matters most. I don't think etiher "cloud native" or "immutable" are really all that helpful as technical terms though, maybe something else should be used (image based, atomic, container centric, ?).

I'm not sure I understand "distros already have htop." Distros already have everything packaged for flatpak, yet they were packaged for flatpak. The real question is why do flatpaks exist at all if you can just run programs in containers, OR why do containers exist at all if you can just run programs as flatpaks (assuming everything we wanted were available as a flatpak). That is: what are the technical / UX reasons to choose flatpak over containers and vice versa?

Podmansh looks very cool! That's definitely the direction I'd like to see these sorts of projects moving in. The #1 issue I have at the moment with this OS model is customization/tinkering/hackability. I want to have the niceties of atomic updates and reproducible builds, and containers on their own are great. But not if it takes away my ability to make my system fit my needs. I have no interest in using a macbook.

The future of these technologies looks bright, and they are clearly functional today, but I'm not sure any of them meet my needs yet as someone who likes to have a great deal of control and understanding of my system.

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 2 points 2 years ago

I don't think it's a coincidence that cloud tech, container tech, Go, and Plan 9 tend to overlap conceptually and demographically.

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I don't know too much about Vanilla OS, is it not possible to install your own DE or WM?

I'm less interested in Vanilla OS since it's based on Ubuntu and I'd rather not support / rely upon anything Canonical if I can help it.

Silverblue (+ spins) seems like the best option since it is the most mature, most popular, and is a community run distro. Of course Redhat pours a lot of resources into the Fedora project since it's upstream RHEL, and so does SUSE for MicroOS. But honestly if Redhat/SUSE were to disappear tomorrow, I think Fedora and OpenSUSE would be fine, whereas I can't say the same for Canonical+Ubuntu (and thus their descendants).

edit: After looking more into Vanilla OS, it looks very nice! Funnily apx addresses excatly the issues with distrobox pointed out in this thread by @mogoh@lemmy.ml. They also plan on moving from being Ubuntu based to Debian Sid based, which would be even better than Fedora as Debian is a true, 100% community backed and time tested distro (though still of course much corporate support).

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

I agree "cloud native" is not great, I won't be using that term.

Why are cli tools generally not available as flatpaks? There's nothing about how flatpak works afaik which distinguishes gui and cli. I get that the original motivation for flatpak was guis, but considering how long it's been touted as a "universal" package manager for linux, I don't understand how there could be so few clis.

I've heard people say the name for packages from flathub is awkward (which it is), and aliasing everything you install would be annoying (which it would), but that sounds like such a simple problem to solve.

I've also heard people say that flatpak clis would be useless because clis tend to be systadmin tools, and thus need to be not sandboxed. But this strikes me as a non sequitur. Gui tools can be used for sysadmin, and there are tons of cli tools which have nothing to do with sysadmin, they're just userspace programs.

What does your workflow look like with toolbox/distrobox?

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

There are two different immutable OS models hot on the table in the linux space I see: The Nix[^1] way and the Silverblue[^2] way.

Both have immutable filesystems which deviate from the FHS, provide atomic updates, and support the creation of more-or-less isolated environments at the user level. But the way the two models implement these features is very different.

The Nix way takes inspiration from the world of functional programming, while the Silverblue way takes inspiration from the containerized, cloud native technologies which are used so widely in the industry.

I believe the idea that these two approaches share is the future of linux on both the server and the desktop, and it is only a matter of time before some (if not all) of these advantages become mainstream. However, I am uncertain of which approach is superior.

I have personal experience with Guix and enjoyed it greatly and even recommend others try it or Nix out for themselves, but there are some complexity issues. It is not clear to me whether these issues are growing pains, or symptoms of a fundamentally overcomplicated system to solve a seemingly simpler problem.

The Silverblue way I have no experience with, but seems like a more grounded approach to tackling the specific problems laid out. The big area where Silverblue seems to lack in comparison to Nix/Guix is declarative, reproducible system configuration. With Nix/Guix you can just throw your system config file up in a repo, and anybody else can pull it down and install that system bit-for-bit, including future you! With home manager this extends to a large extent to user configuration as well. Of course with Silverblue you can create images, but that is less straightforward and powerful (at least for now).

What are ya'll's thoughts on immutable OS's?

[^1]: The only other example I am aware of is Guix, which imo is the superior implementation, but it is newer and less popular. [^2]: Others include openSUSE's MircoOS/Aeon and Vanilla OS.

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 2 points 2 years ago

Very nice and quite similar to my Void + River + Everforest setup

[–] mrh@mander.xyz 2 points 2 years ago

I find hacking maps to be sets with map[T]bool or map[T]struct{} to be awkward for the most rudimentary use case, membership checking, and downright onerous for anything more "complicated."

I feel as though the datastructure "an unordered collection of things without duplicates, with constant time lookup" is so simple and useful, I don't see any reason to keep it out of the language.

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