Blóðbók

Well I upvoted the post so that people will see the comments!

You managed to get your money back?! How?

I think that’s an american thing. Besides, that money is long gone since I made the purchase several years ago.

I asked for a refund when they kept delaying shipment of my Librem 5. I was simply denied and that was it. They told me I could still choose to receive the phone, but I don’t want it since it’s a bad, practically useless product now.

I reported them in my country for it.

If it is dry due to climate change I don’t see how there is an eco-system built around the drought worth preserving.

I don’t remember encountering the particular bug they’re describing. I was hoping it was about the behaviour of drag-and-dropping something into the browser, such as with those “drop a file here to upload”. I am often simply unable to make that work because instead of the thing being dropped into the webpage’s element, it opens the file in the browser instead, which is not really something I ever want to do.

Same problem, 1070, NixOS Plasma

Am mildly curious to know what circumstance and economic policies might have contributed to this. Always good to study successful recipes.

I finally got around to restarting my system after adding hardware.nvidia.modesetting.enable = true; to my NixOS config and it works perfectly! Thank you for the suggestion. I likely wouldn’t have figured that out on my own any time soon.

Thanks for the suggestion. sudo cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset indeed prints N, so I’ll try adding that to my system config.

I think the Xorg vs Wayland situation is not too dissimilar to that of Windows vs Linux. Lots of people are waiting for all of their games/software work (just as well or better) on Linux before switching. I believe that in most cases, switching to Linux requires that a person goes out of their way to either find alternatives to the software they use or altogether change the way they use their computer. It’s a hard sell for people who only use their computer to get their work done, and that’s why it is almost exclusively developers, tech-curious, idealists, government workers, and grandparents who switch to Linux (thanks to a family member who falls into any subset of the former categories). It may require another generation (of people) for X11 to be fully deprecated, because even amongst Linux users there are those who are not interested in changing their established workflow.

I do think it’s unreasonable to expect everything to work the same when a major component is being replaced. Some applications that are built with X11 in mind will never be ported/adapted to work on Wayland. It’s likely that for some things, no alternatives are ever going to exist.

Good news is that we humans are complex adaptive systems! Technology is always changing - that’s just the way of it. Sometimes that will lead to perceived loss of functionality, reduction in quality, or impeded workflow in the name of security, resource efficiency, moral/political reasons, or other considerations. Hopefully we can learn to accept such change, because that’ll be a virtue in times to come.

(This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable for userspace to be suddenly broken because contributors thought of a more elegant way to write underlying software. Luckily, X11 isn’t being deprecated anytime soon for just this reason.)

Ok I’m done rambling.

As soon as it works. A recent update included Plasma 6.0.2 (on NixOS unstable/24.05) which apparently defaults to wayland, but it just exits to login right away. I’m not in a mood to tinker, so for now I plan to simply wait for things to Just Work. When I select “wayland” and things work and look the same (or better) is when I’m happy to rid myself of the horror that is X11, because as horrible as X11 is, it simply isn’t giving me trouble these days - my system is stable and I like keeping it that way.

Edit: perhaps important to mention that I’m using a GTX 1070.

Edit 2: I realise that I’m sort of contradicting myself with how I worded the above. I don’t mean to imply that I’m not willing to sacrifice anything to embrace Wayland; just that as it stands I don’t think the benefits of Wayland outweighs my ability to use this computer the way I need to.

Because they have no basis on which to decide where to go. It’s like buying toothpaste but there are hundreds of options, none of which you know anything about, so you get whichever seems most popular. It minimises the risk of ending up with something which is unpopular for good reasons.

I’m curious as to what you think about the actual meaning of those sentences, then. Do you think that there ought to be protection against consequences, regardless of what one says? Should there be any exceptions at all? What is the domain of applicability? Certain types of expression, certain types of topics, intended audience, etc?

Edit: oh and what about freedom from? Is there any situation in which a person has a right to shut someone down from “expressing themselves” to them without their consent?

While all of it is doable, be aware that it takes time and effort to learn Nix and NixOS. It can be difficult to figure out how to get a particular environment set up properly. There is a lot of documentation, but it doesn’t always give easy answers if you have specific requirements for a particular dev environment and such.

It’s been a few years since I worked with Unity3D professionally, but I did so in NixOS with very little trouble. Rust has very good Nix infrastructure and so do many other languages. I can’t tell you anything about UE5 or the other proprietary tools, but there are FHS-compatibility helpers (steam-run usually works fine when I need to run arbitrary binaries made for ‘normal’ distros).

If you’re willing to figure things out sometimes (and especially in the beginning) and are motivated to take your OS to the next level, NixOS is definitely worth it. Been using it for many years and I can’t imagine ever using a mutable OS again as a daily driver (unless the way I use my computer drastically changes). I configured everything just the way I want it; it’s magical to have almost everything in one place and being able to try different things without fear of breaking something.

You only has to ask an AI a complicated question to which you already know the answer to see why you shouldn’t trust anything elseit says. LLMs have their uses, but answering questions is not one.

Just want to add that I don’t think it’s a technological plateau. I think it’s capitalism producing shiny and “upgraded” versions of things that are easy to sell. Things that enable accessible and rapid consumption. High refresh rate, vertical high-resolution screens for endless scrolling in apps optimised for ads-scrolled-past-per-second. E-ink devices only good enough that you can clearly see the ads on them as you read your books. Things are just not made for humans. They’re made for corporations to extract value out of humans.

I’m just disappointed in the direction of UX they’re all taking. Ubuntu Touch was looking innovative and made me excited. Then that didn’t happen and now we just have a bunch of Android look-alikes but worse and buggier. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad to have GNU/Linux on a phone either way (especially NixOS Mobile), but I’m not excited to use one.

I don’t know if it’s just me getting older or if innovation in how we interface with technology has just sort of stagnated. In the past there was so much happening. New input methods (all kinds of pointer devices, joysticks, weird keyboards); graphical paradigms (floating windows vs tiling panes, tabs, stacking, grouping, virtual desktops); display technologies (vector graphics, convex screens, flat screens, projectors, VR headsets, e-ink); even machine architectures (eg Lisp machines) and how you interacted with your computer environment as a result.

As far as I can tell, VR systems are the latest innovation and they haven’t changed significantly in close to a decade. E-ink displays are almost nowhere to be found, or only attached to shitty devices (thanks, patent laws) - although I’m excited for the PineNote to eventually happen.

How do we still not have radial menus?! Or visual graph-like pipelining for composing input-outputs between bespoke programs?! We’ve all settled on a very homogenous way of interacting with computers, and I don’t believe for a second that it’s the best way.

It has so many interesting possible applications. Declarative and reproducible wine configurations for games and software; universal (cross-distro) packaging (without emulated runtime environments like flatpak); reproducible user environments managed easily with a GUI with trivial version control (both for config and software versions); pre-configuring a system before even setting it up (such as configuring a raspberry pi before you’ve even bought one so that once you have, you just install and configure everything in one go).

It isn’t not the goal, either. Nix is very popular with devs for many obvious reasons, so most of the developments naturally has to do with making that an even better experience. That doesn’t mean accessibility is a non-goal; there just isn’t a great deal of motivation to work on making the operating system easy for non-devs to use.