Please stay to the end because it’s important, and it’s going to be a horrible bait and switch but it’s not INTENDED that way. I can’t think of another way to present the difficult combination of interests that seem to be driving MS software lately.

I actually quite like Windows 11, and I love Edge when they’re doing their core functions. Windows 11 is reasonably solid and useful for normal use. Edge is faster than Chrome and has the best vertical tabs implementation on the planet. Much of the baseline software that Microsoft is putting out has never been better, and is often really good at doing the basic things software should do. I really do feel like the genuine technology people in Microsoft are trying, and often succeeding, to make good technology products.

But… the bottom-feeder marketing drones and MBAs got their hands on them and started layering creepier and creepier nonsense over the top. Mandatory logins to glorified data collection engines. Monetization strategies masquerading as features. Overt advertisement. Heavy-handed promotion of Microsoft’s own products. I finally stopped using Edge (on Linux!) when I discovered that just looking at the settings the wrong way would re-enable every intrusive setting imaginable and ditched Windows entirely when I saw the same things creeping into the OS (as well as a general disgust with privately-owned OSes in general). They are destroying trust.

In the great irony of my life, because normally work PC Windows installs have been hot garbage, I have Win11 on a work laptop and it’s actually really great to use since all of the intrusive stuff is turned off by our security team. I would still prefer linux or macos (in that order), but as a “forced to use it” option, it’s not bad at all. Go back and read that again: it’s a pleasant and easy to use OS if all the intrusive marketing functionality is turned off because it presents a security hazard.

PS. Not sacrificing anything being predominantly linux-based and am in fact far, far more efficient on linux (and I am not a programmer or in any other technology role).

Endeavour is an Arch flavor that has a bunch of ease of use features, like a simple® installer.

11 months later …

NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp

NixOS on an M2 Air here. Works fine, other than the fingerprint reader.

The 2016-2017 MBP are unusually bad. Devices on either side of that? You’re fine. But the 2016-2017 devices? No wifi (except in some extremely unusual cases) is the big problem. Even then, it amazes me how much does work, with zero configuration, with a simple graphical install. The problem with this vintage MBP isn’t that it’s hard to get running–it’s that it’s (almost) impossible, but the parts that aren’t impossible are as smooth as they can be.

Yes, that’s cold comfort. But I’m speaking from the POV of an owner of a 2017 MBP who desperately wanted to keep it going.

The coda to the story is that my wife used it for a while with her business but it fell victim to an absolutely bizarre heat issue where the heat sink vents hot air directly across the controller cable for the display, leading to inevitable failure. Again: not an issue on either side of this model year. It’s sad because it could’ve served for another 4-5 years, making the initial purchase price substantially more tolerable.

And that’s without counting the roll-your-own variants. uBlue has been a remarkable project.

Apple IIc > Windows 3.1 > Windows 95 > Windows 98 > Windows XP > Brief experiment with Ubuntu in the REALLY purple and brown era > OS X > Elementary > Fedora > Endeavour > Fedora > Silverblue > ublue > NixOS

(not counting numerous VMs with everything from Debian to Linux From Scratch)

I’m on a refurb M2 Air that I picked up from Apple for peanuts. It took me about 15m to get NixOS running on the thing, and it’s going to last me for 10 years, if my old MBP is anything to go by.

Also, regardless of the hardware politics, I’m not sure I’ve been in awe of a project as much as I have the Asahi team. They’re just doing so much so quickly and with such command of the subject … and they’re so young. It’s a joy to watch them work.

LOL yep. I’m deleting the parent.

Let’s see.

Bearnaise
Bechamel
Apple
Pesto
Ketchup
Sweet BBQ
Chimichurri
Gravy
Panang
Romesco
Tabasco
Mustard BBQ
Vinegar BBQ
Mustard
Mole
Garum

The scale admittedly ramps up exponentially at the end there.

Upvoting not because you agreed with me but because of the relief of discovering my flagrantly innocuous frustration might have a kernel of justification.

deleted by creator

It appears that it is. The first version, February-based, is 24.2. The next scheduled version is 24.8, scheduled for release in August.

If that’s the case, I’m less saucy, but my understanding was that the numbers were based on the release month. (Noting for emphasis that I cannot overstate the absolutely minimal nature of my irritation and that it doesn’t detract even a whisker from my appreciation of Libreoffice! It’s almost, but not quite, tongue in cheek.)

I’m still saucy (in magnitude, bechamel not mole) that the version numbering is yy.n (24.2) and not yy.nn (24.02). The actual versioning combines the “was there a version .1?” problem with a sorting issue if there’s both 24.2 and 24.10.

That’s pretty much how I got where I am. Started with Fedora, then Silverblue, then Ublue, then fleek (a custom front end for Home Manager), then, when I saw what Home Manager and Nix could do, dove into NixOS fully.

First, I don’t disagree with that, but I’m always conflicted. Like, eza is better than ls. Atuin is magic history search. btop/fish/helix etc. etc. etc. But for just getting started I almost want to discourage finding alternative tools. But I also don’t lol.

Also, I am 99.9% certain this exchange is how most distros get started. “We can do a more sensible set of defaults!”

Day 1: Sway looks cool Day 11: SwayFX looks cooler Day 29: Hyprland looks wild Day 44: niri looks fun Day 63: This WM I found on a repo by a random Serbian guy looks great. Day 97: I WROTE MY OWN WAYLAND COMPOSITOR AND WINDOW MANAGEMENT CONCEPT FROM SCRATCH

I look back on learning to live with NixOS and laugh. It made my brain hurt, and if I’d only found the Misterio77 repo sooner, it would’ve saved a lot of premature aging. But, if you have some basic familiarity with programming concepts, it’s an easy OS to live with, just different. And so, so, so, so powerful.

They do desperately need a set of opinionated example builds and much better documentation.

One of the more annoying things about living in Florida is that we have closely related animals that are nearly identical, but they don’t have glow-butts. (At least not down in the bottom half of the state.)

I’ll wait for someone from like Lakeland to say they have them.