tarneo

To me, this is only one of the few advantages of immutability. I have already used nixOS on a server and I really didn't like having to learn how to do everything the right way. As for distrobox, to me it sounds quite like an additional failure point: it is an abstraction over the containers concept that hides the actual way it is done from you. I'd say if you run an app in a container, go all the way: make the container yourself. To me it just sounds like a bad idea, and I didn't really like distrobox when I tried it. I just want to say that both of these concepts (immutability, distrobox) would be great if it was perfectly done. But the learning curve of nixos and the wackiness of distrobox drove me away.

Yes. But p10k has many downsides:

• requires using oh my ZSH, which alone is quite bad because of how much slower it makes the shell.
• is a piece of software you'll have to either install on each new device or have the software in your dotfiles. Bad practice. I very much prefer having no additional dependencies or overhead, plus the way I do it I can do whatever I want without the limitations of a prompt made by someone else, for which I'd have to dig in a lot of documentation. Compared to this, I only spent half an hour making a prompt exactly how I like, which doesn't add overhead and doesn't require a third party piece of software which I'd have to install on every new device.

Free software tells you "do whatever you want, you're free" but open source completely misses the point: it means you can read the code, but not necessarily recompile, modify and redistribute. Plus the term was invented for the confusion that would come from it. For example, a lot of AI models like LLM's claim they are "open-source", which basically means nothing: it's far easier to say that than to claim it's a free model, because that would imply freedoms to modify, reuse, redistribute the training data, weight etc. (no AI model allows that for now, and there will probably never be one that does).

I totally agree. But I just wouldn't necessarily say gentoo is a bleeding edge distro: it's kinda up to the user. They are free to configure the package manager (portage) however they want and can even do updates manually. I just like the idea of having newer packages at the cost of stability, because I also use the server as a shell account host (with an isolated user ;-)) and need things like the latest neovim. These days I would know if an update failed because I would literally be in front of the process and test services are working after the updates, so I'd know if I have to rollback. This makes it basically like a stable distro IMO (even though the packages aren't battle tested before being pushed as updates).

Unattended updates are 10x better because those programs allow you to only do security updates. Plus they are much more stable, and something like this would never happen on a stable distro.

I'm surprised this strategy was approved for a public server

The goal was to avoid getting hacked on a server that could have many vulnerable services (there are more than 20 services on there). When I set this up I was basically freaked out by the fact I hadn't updated mastodon more than a week after the last critical vulnerability in it was found (arbitrary code execution on the server). The quantity of affected users, compared to the impact it would have if hacked, made me choose the option of auto-updates back then, even if I now agree it wasn't clever (and I ended up shooting myself I'm the foot). These days I just do updates semi-regularly and I am subscribed to mailing lists like oss-security to know there's a vulnerability as early as possible. Plus I am not the only person in charge anymore.

That's what I learned :-)

Edit: no saying that isn't rude

Yup. gives nickel back

Sorry, I forgot to convert my orgmode formatting to markdown. Fixed it

Here are a few nice ones, I can't really pick:

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.” - John Maynard Keynes

(You can also apply this one to proprietary software vs. Free software (don't say open source in my presence))

“The tyrants are only great because we are on our knees.” - Étienne de La Boétie

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” - Rosa Luxemburg

Use a non-chromium browser son that web environment integrity doesn't work. (Librewolf)

What mail client is that?