Same for me. I distro-hopped for about 20 years with OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and Fedora being the most memorable desktop setups for me. While all that was a valuable experience, NixOS feels like graduation.

For the Nix-curious: I wish someone would have told me not to bother with the classic config and build a flake-based system immediately. They’re “experimental” in name only, very stable and super useful in practice.

It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s a challenging concept to have to explain to immigration officials at the airport.

Don’t Stand So Close to Me
The Police

Who’s in Your Head
Jonas Brothers

All around
America

“grub rescue” would be great name for a fast food restaurant

surround the “\d+.” with a question mark group?

If you’re expecting decimals, that’s the preferred solution:

(?<!\d)(\d+\.)?\d+(?=\s*$)

Otherwise you could do simply

(?<!\d)\d+(?=\s*$)

I added the lookahead (?=\s*$) to match digits at the end of the line only with possible trailing spaces.

I agree it’s very confusing. There’s this GitHub issue that goes a bit into the differences. If you don’t have any special requirements, I’d probably try the wine-wayland package first.

dm: “you are knocked prone”
me: "actually,

Oof, that collarbone

Velociraptor = ∫ Acceleraptor ⨉ Timeraptor

I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I’m pessimistic that any flavor of Linux will be an acceptable experience for the person you’re describing. Something like Silverblue may be least obstrusive, but compatibility will still be a prominent problem.

Alternatively, you could show them surface level cool stuff that’s easier to do with Linux. Like blocking all ads, running your own Minecraft server, downloading YouTube videos, building your own PC with cheap parts (and maybe even pirating movies and TV shows, depending on your own practices and relationship to that person). There’s a lot to love about Linux even if you don’t care about privacy and open software as abstract values.

When I was 10 years old my father told me the grain joke. Do you know it? This extra-terrestrial reports on her travels through space. She has studied the earth. ‘‘An interesting planet’’, she says, ‘‘it is inhabited by grasses of various sizes. Some live in shallow water and others on dry land. They all have two legged creatures working for them. These creatures eliminate other plants so that the grasses may grow without being disturbed too much. They also keep hungry beasts away. At the end of a season, the creatures carefully assemble the grains of the grasses, so as to sow them again on the next possible occasion and set a new cycle in motion. The creatures keep a few grains for themselves to feed on, but overall they expand the grasses’ living space a bit more every year. It is very impressive’’.

Mol, Annemarie. 2008. I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities. Subjectivity 22 (1): 28–37. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.2

$ uname -sr
Linux 6.6.88

I have never bothered about alternative kernels. The only time I seriously researched other kernels was when I was considering trying out GUIX about five years ago, but I only felt reassured in using Linux as a result of that research.

The way I usually start teaching using the console to my (very much non-tech) students is set up a safe container and then let them type whatever, invariably generating a lot of error messages. Then I challenge them to generate different error messages, “gotta catch em all” style. Then we talk about the error messages and what they might mean. After this exercise they usually get the basic idea of command – response, what to look out for and how to compose valid commands.

Jiminy Cricket, imagine not being able to tell the difference between an error code and an image of an error code, and imagine subsequently, for some reason, not immediately inspecting the HTTP request and response. Sounds like a very real #programming #devops problem.

This sounds like a good idea, but I think the problem here is that a lot of popular software runs great on Linux but is very clunky and ugly on other systems (looking at you, LibreOffice). So keep that in mind if you try out FOSS on Windows as a sneak peek.

Navigation on Android: Osmand lets you download and cache OSM data so you can use it offline. Cache is unlimited if you download Osmand via F-Droid.

You can put together a media server and build a catalogue so you can watch movies and series offline. Maybe not a huge priority in that situation but definitely nice to have.

Jellyfin is a good option for streaming from a media server to other devices. The *arr suite is an option for building the catalogue.

I understand it’s easy, but I don’t want to sully my omnipotent flake with a casual nixpkgs.follows = "nixos-cosmic/nixpkgs";. It’s probably fine, but I can wait.

I’m waiting for Cosmic to be merged into NixOS stable which I learned is just around the corner (May). I’m super excited because Cosmic seems to strike a sensible balance between polished, full-featured, make-everyone-happy mainstream DE and performance-oriented tiling WM.

Although I’ve never tested the Alpha, I have a feeling that I might finally make the switch (from Gnome) on my daily driver once it’s mature enough.

“I mean it’s all just numbers, right?”