Nix can build you a bit-to-bit exact environment for your app. It is a superior environment, but is hard to use in the beginning and users can feel snobby sometimes. It is awesome, but YMMV.
Nix can build you a bit-to-bit exact environment for your app. It is a superior environment, but is hard to use in the beginning and users can feel snobby sometimes. It is awesome, but YMMV.
Nix user arrives to the room.
Plex and plexamp are quite good. Jellyfin and finamp too.
For sure. I would say if you run a distro like Arch, using it without cow filesystem and snapshots is not a good idea… You can even integrate snapshots with pacman and bootloader.
I’ve been running nixos for so long, that I don’t really need snapshots. You can always boot to the previous state if needed.
If you write software and run tests against a database, I’d avoid having the docker volumes on btrfs pool. The performance is not great.
Yeah. I would not for example install ZFS to a laptop. It’s just not great there, and it doesn’t like things such as sudden power failure, and it uses kind of a lot of memory…
ZFS is still the de-facto standard of a reliable filesystem. It’s super stable, and annoyingly strict on what you can do with it. Their Raid5 and Raid6 support are the only available software raids in those levels that are guaranteed to not eat your data. I’ve run a TrueNAS server with Raid6 for years now, with absolutely no issues and tens of terabytes of data.
But, these copy on write filesystems such as ZFS or btrfs are not great for all purposes. For example running a Postgres server on any CoW filesystem will require a lot of tweaking to get reasonable speeds with the database. It’s doable, but it’s a lot of settings to change.
About the code quality of Linux filesystems, Kent Overstreet, the author of the next new CoW filesystem bcachefs, has a good write-up of the ups and downs:
- ext4, which works - mostly - but is showing its age. The codebase terrifies most filesystem developers who have had to work on it, and heavy users still run into terrifying performance and data corruption bugs with frightening regularity. The general opinion of filesystem developers is that it’s a miracle it works as well as it does, and ext4’s best feature is its fsck (which does indeed work miracles).
- xfs, which is reliable and robust but still fundamentally a classical design - it’s designed around update in place, not copy on write (COW). As someone who’s both read and written quite a bit of filesystem code, the xfs developers (and Dave Chinner in particular) routinely impress me with just how rigorous their code is - the quality of the xfs code is genuinely head and shoulders above any other upstream filesystem. Unfortunately, there is a long list of very desirable features that are not really possible in a non COW filesystem, and it is generally recognized that xfs will not be the vehicle for those features.
- btrfs, which was supposed to be Linux’s next generation COW filesystem - Linux’s answer to zfs. Unfortunately, too much code was written too quickly without focusing on getting the core design correct first, and now it has too many design mistakes baked into the on disk format and an enormous, messy codebase - bigger that xfs. It’s taken far too long to stabilize as well - poisoning the well for future filesystems because too many people were burned on btrfs, repeatedly (e.g. Fedora’s tried to switch to btrfs multiple times and had to switch at the last minute, and server vendors who years ago hoped to one day roll out btrfs are now quietly migrating to xfs instead).
- zfs, to which we all owe a debt for showing us what could be done in a COW filesystem, but is never going to be a first class citizen on Linux. Also, they made certain design compromises that I can’t fault them for - but it’s possible to better. (Primarily, zfs is block based, not extent based, whereas all other modern filesystems have been extent based for years: the reason they did this is that extents plus snapshots are really hard).
I started evaluating bcachefs in my main workstation when it arrived to the stable kernels. It can do pretty good raid-1 with encryption and compression. This combination is not really available integrated to the filesystem in anywhere else but zfs. And zfs doesn’t work with all the kernels, which prevents updating to the latest and greatest. It is already a pretty usable system, and in a few years will probably take the crown as the default filesystem in mainstream distros.
I run Piped from my homelab, from our home IP. I wonder if they will limit our home too…
About five years with Wayland now. Started with sway and now running KDE Plasma 6. It is snappy, simple and definitely so good I will not miss X11.
(I also think systemd is cool, you can crucify me now)
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What about us who will never want to see any ads ever in our life? Can these companies force fed them to us and we kind of just accept that?
I’m coming from the old ages of internet where we didn’t have them. I’m fine with them, but I’m too old to use them comfortably.
It’s fine. Use them if you like, but I don’t really see the value in systems such as Discord where you pay money to have special emojis and so on…
I borrowed an installation CD from the local library around 1998. It was RedHat 5.x, and I started messing around with it due to me being interested in alternative operating systems. Before it, I had OS/2 Warp 3.0 in our IBM Pentium 100 MHz family computer which didn’t really do it for me to be honest.
It took weeks to get anything working with Linux. I went to the library, borrowing books. In our middle school we had an internet connection, so I utilized it to learn how to configure modelines correctly to get X11 running.
When it did finally run, the default window manager was FVWM95, almost like Windows 95!
I used OSX a few years in the power PC times, just to switch back to Linux around 2008.
Edit: my real love for Linux started when I got Debian running. RedHat didn’t have anything comparable to apt those days. You needed to download RPM packages manually with all the dependencies, while apt just worked with one command.
Yep. I switched from xorg/i3 years ago, and it was already super snappy back then compared to the previous setup. Today everything works with Wayland, and I don’t really need to think about it anymore.
But, ymmv. I avoid Nvidia’s products, which helps a lot for the stability.
Me too. Although I will not cry if Stubb takes the presidency. Will not vote for him, but it will not be the end of the world either.
I used both of them for a long time. Plex(amp) for music because it just works for streaming my collection everywhere I go and has a good UI. My own personal Spotify… And Jellyfin for everything else.
Now I built a new homelab server with a beefier AMD and proxmox, and decided to just switch to Plex for all my content. It has a better UI to my taste at least, but it also has these weird glitches sometimes where the video playback stutters if watching 4k material (where Jellyfin just worked).
I don’t know really. For music Plex is definitely worth the subscription price, but these weird playback issues put me to consider alternatives for video content.
Yeah, well we were a month in KC just before and ate the most amazing food. It was so crazy to get that thing from the restaurant when we got back.
Yep. I’m from Europe and of course this is kind of not understanding American culture enough to not compare different qualities of mac&cheese. That reminds me, we came back home from the US and had mac&cheese in a restaurant in Germany. They served us Kraft with fried onions and parmesan flakes on top. At that moment I understood Germans will never understand American cuisine…
It creates a set of symlinks so every program sees exactly the dependencies it needs.
https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/09-automatic-runtime-dependencies#automatic-runtime-dependencies
You can also create a container:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_Containers
Or you can create reproducible docker containers with nix:
https://dev.to/anurag_vishwakarma/a-better-way-to-build-reproducible-docker-images-with-nix-2k59
The secret sauce with nix is reproducibility. If it builds once, it will continue building exactly like that forever. Bit by bit.