What fight? Don’t delude yourselves. Trump is doing whatever he wants and Democrats are just letting it happen. Don’t hold it against the rest of the world for noting this.
That’s not true. My senator for example is constantly fighting and filing challenges. There are countless lawsuits. We are unfortunately outnumbered in the gov but hopefully the midterm will change that. I do agree though that on the whole we are losing / they are getting a bunch of BS through.
Like summer heat records, the past 3 protests have been the largest by percentage and by sheer population in US history.
GQP controls both the House and Senate, plus SCOTUS. And Republicans have been a monolithic bloc since Gingrich instituted a no-compromise policy. Even if Jeffries wasn't a waste of oxygen, there's not much more that could be done.
No, democracy doesn't mean everyone supports this administration. And in fact, this administration has declared that the blue states are the "enemy from within." If anything you should be sending us survival gear when Trump eventually launches war on us.
I just don't get why they didn't go with OVH in Montreal or something like that. Odd to switch to EU in my opinion. I'm currently using OVH in Montreal for many years and never had any issues.
I agree with you that the author of this project is catching a stray bullet, but I also have to agree with GP that `curl | bash` got way too out of hand.
I don't know where that came from but it should definitely disappear.
At least the developer includes the binaries for all platforms in the GitHub release page.
It's not crazy to prefer a package manager package to a curl|bash YOLO. OP is stating that preference, which various people have agreed with. If you posted "I love curl|bash install method - please do more of this" that is also fine. Either way it's a signal for both the author and anyone considering shipping this type of software, that their audience may have a certain preference.
I like the friction aspect to some extent because I think keeping the base system pure confers many benefits. But you’re right. Bazzite imposes a certain workflow. For installing new software …
1) try ujust first (since there is some porcelain provided for some things that can be challenging to install properly on immutable distros, such as Steam or DaVinci Resolve)
2) if that doesn’t work, try flatpaks from Bazaar/Flathub
3) if that doesn’t work, use Homebrew which installs into your home dir by default
4) use rpm-ostree as a last resort.
Functionally I find this has driven me towards a very devcontainer-centric setup. Of course in theory Nix can do better, but in practice I’ve found the combo Bazzite offers, not to mention the excellent hardware support, hits the sweet spot for me.
My issue with Silverblue is that the unix exosystem was meant to be deeply collaborative ecosystem for programs. Meaning each program doing one thing and communicating with each other through various IPC mechanisms. Atomic systems with containers broke that.
Like I’ve created a rough media player with curl, jq, mpv powered by my subsonic server. The same issues happens with my emacs config which depends on various utilities. Yes I could create a main toolbox for all of that, but the whole thing was a bit cumbersome.
Much more resource heavy. I tried NixOS and Bazzite (and other spins purporting to be lighteweight) and the difference on a 2010-era mid-range laptop was noticeable in terms of sluggishness. Not that this laptop was going to be my daily driver, but I like experimenting. It was a good showing for NixOS and that decided which one I would take. All of the other nice things about NixOS (fast rebuilding, easy install images, remote deploy, easy build tweaks, ...) were cherries on top.
It gets worse when you are not a solo dev, and there's sufficient variety on people's setups. Oops, someone updated a version, and then built things for just their processor, and now I am stuck in a 20 minute compilation loop because some bad pin. Debugging Nix problems like those makes me think that old Gentoo Linux back in 2005 was easy and user friendly.
Updating causing a rebuild isn't really a Nix or even a build tool problem though, is it? cache.nixos.org can't provide everything for every architecture all the time.
With multiple types of machines involved, you want some sort of binary cache setup, ideally automated with CI. There's niks3 [0], celler [1] (a more active fork of attic [2]), hydra [3].
The way I set it up at my shop was that everything would build on your PR, and so by the time it merged, everything was already cached and no one should see a rebuild... at most a download.
Im thinking through this for my team, any previous writeups on it? Or do you mind brain dumping the high level of how you had it setup from a design perspective : D
The first was the "toolkit" repo that had all the manual maintained dependencies and functions, while the second was a managed repo which would have tags pushed to it by the pipeline.
So basically all the repos had a push hook attached to them that would run this centralized dispatch workflow (on Jenkins, but it could be anything). The dispatch job would sanitize the branch name like joey-b/fancy-feature and attach it to the most recent "released version" + devel timestamp, so you'd end up with like 2.25+20260808-12345+joey-b-fancy-feature, and that would be pushed as a floating tag to the nix-ros repo with all the sources from the hundreds of participating repos either locked to the versions set in the top level 2.25 devel branches or to the specified feature branch, so that a given build could pull together multiple same-named branches from across repos. That would be sent off to Hydra, and nix2container outputs were also built that went to simulator based validation.
But the end UI was pretty nice, basically a nix configuration mapped the names to the those repos so after the build was done you could just pull it and "enter the workspace" environment like:
And if you were hacking on the "base" repo itself, it was very easy to pass flags like --override-input base=ros-base#some-ref or path/to/local for quick iteration.
Anyway, as I say, I'm obviously proud of what was achieved, particularly in a pre-LLM world, and the experience of building this has given me many of pg's blub experiences over the years, where I look at the ways that other build and packaging systems solve these problems and think yes, yes I can see how that works, but also, I have experienced a world where in exchange for some relatively minor strictness tradeoffs, the set of problems that that is solving never had to exist in the first place.
Awesome, thanks for taking the time to put this together, that really is impressive pre-LLM. We wont be at this level for a while but its great to have resources to look at for examples of others have solved things.
If you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical people that spend most of their lives looking at a computer, not interacting with people face-to-face, does not exactly lend itself to socio-emotional maturity. Seems like in the case of Nix, the more mature people have repeatedly gotten burned out trying to tend to the mess and create a healthy community. It's extremely difficult to get someone to be humble, listen, reflect, and grow, when they are already upset and have their defenses up. And without our normal human tools or other trusted peers to help, like we can call on in real life, it can sometimes be near impossible.
Plus, in our highly individualized and hierarchical society, people don't have a lot of practice making decisions democratically, or coming to a consensus with people they disagree with. "Group projects" in grade school is pretty much the only time this happens during our socialization, which is incredibly sparse and inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.
Technical people (or people with bad social skills) also love to inadequately and incorrectly try and turn the complexity of social organization into simple laws and rules. This kind of reduction doesn't really do people a service, and is also a bit arrogant and simple-minded. It would be much more interesting to name this as a tendency, and try to describe when and how it might occur, how the structure of the org might influence it, etc. Decontextualized takes projected onto everything like this are kind of misapplied and meaningless.
Aren't you guilty of the same thing by generalising that "technical people <love> simple laws and rules"? Also, calling people arrogant and simple-minded is a great example of behaviour that makes it difficult to hold a community together. We can have discussions without having to resort to insults.
I mean this is one case where the "law" is arguably true
The Nix drama from the start has been profoundly untethered from actual development or improvement of the project rather than minutia of committee organization and moderation of the Discourse forum
Whatever you think about the $5000 Anduril sponsorship for example, the "discussion" around that took up a ridiculous amount of mindshare relative to the actual dev work compared to almost any other open source project like Linux kernel for example
I know that it isn't always (heh) used as literally always and necessarily, but really there are no laws or always with human behavior. It's extremely dynamic and reactive. No organization will always do anything of such sort. I also like the word tendency.
what was the Nix schism? Did something like systemd happen? or like, Determinate/commercial vs Not? Or more like USA culture wars / code-of-conduct flamers (i vaguely recall some drama around a conference sponsor)?
anyways, i hope there’s a path to some kind of redemption and reconciliation in the future for the community. it sounds like it’s been Bad for years at this point.
The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community
I have tried very hard to find any examples of what this is a actually referring to and genuinely have no idea
Whatever the legitimate issues were, the letter undermines its own credibility with its overbearing and self-righteous tone. Aside from Determinate Systems and the Anduril bit, the complaints lack specificity. The Blueskyisms thrown around here are just as indicative of "cultural problems" as anything else, assuming these views are representative of the community.
>The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community
>For context, Anduril is a military contractor who produce drones using machine learning on Nvidia GPUs on NixOS as well as ML based systems for detecting migrants on the US-Mexico border, cheapening state violence against migrants.
Given that ICE are currently breaking into peoples apartments and rounding people up into concentration camps, would it not be logical to conclude that the company providing software for the agency are fascists and by extension Eelco relitigating the sponsorship policy can be taken as allowing fascists in the community?
Technology creates cliques. Some of them formed for good reasons, others maybe not.
The nature of nix prevents the nix community from being a group of like minded people because it tries to be a unifying layer over technology which is not made by like minded people. To do what nix does, you need to overcome whatever forces caused those cliques to form in the first place. You need representatives from each group. It's a bit like congress, which has similar problems.
And its not just disparate language communities. It's people who want to build influential businesses, and its people who want to insulate themselves against the influence of tech business. Its people who think it's OK to build killer robots, and it's people who don't want to be killed by those robots.
Getting people work together is hard. Nixpkgs tries to do that to such a degree that you can put a version number the result. Maybe it's admirable, maybe it's folly. I think it's both.
I'm not going to blame the people who are ambitious enough to try because as far as I'm aware, whatever other successful communities exist, they're succeeding at a less audacious goal.
If you’re unlucky in the same way I was, it could actually be a GNOME/GTK issue. Some questionable (?) font rendering decisions were made that for me caused all text in GNOME to be blurry. I hated it so much I switched to KDE but soon realized GTK apps had the same issue.
Eventually I found a fix that worked and now I’m happy. So, next time you can try this. In the file:
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