That’s the power of AI.

The average Linux user definitely will not care about reproducibility.

I think a lot of people do care about it, just not under that name. But I think a lot of users asked themselves at least once “what did I do back then to achieve X”. Not in that the whole system is reproduced 1:1, but certain aspects. That’s something much easier to answer with nix.

Well, you don’t need to learn nix as a programming language for a simple installation, you can use it like a slightly different json, which the configuration.nix part was about. You can get the reproducibility aspect from just that, so I wouldn’t say you get no benefits at all without learning the language.

There are more disadvantages (like time required to rebuild because you added a single package), so Arch is the better choice depending on preferences. Arch is a very good traditional distribution in my opinion, can’t go wrong with it

Arch is easier in my opinion, at least if you want to leverage the power NixOS can offer. A simple /etc/nixos/configuration.nix maybe not, but once you enter custom options / submodule territory and use stuff like lib.mapAttrs, I’d say NixOS is quite harder. Or just a more complex overrideAttrs. But then again, Arch doesn’t have an equivalent to that…

Well I sit kind of between these

Like I’m not getting a dedicated router and have no server room in my apartment, and my consumer router only supports two VLANs (main and guest). But I’d say the rest is rather sophisticated with all machines defined in my NixOS config, including automated generation of firewall and reverse proxy rules for which I wrote custom modules.

Media server isn’t super full but connected to jellyseer and the rest of the stack, accessible over TLS (Let’s Encrypt certificates) only, with the option to have users managed via IDM.

However, I only have devices on my network that I somewhat trust, with an Android TV box being the worst offender. The smart TV was never connected to my network.

Would be cool to isolate my work PCs somewhat (I work from home with company provided equipment) but it’s just not worth the trouble in my opinion. Not switching out a low power device that does most for two different devices that both use more power (since you usually need a router and a modem).

Without having tried it, I think Bazzite fits a certain user group very well, but is less suited for other users. Which is fine.

I don’t really see how it’s particularly good for homelabbing, but use whatever works for you.

My niche distribution is cooler than your niche distribution.

The ifunny watermark really sells it

Edit: unfortunately I won’t settle for less than ebaumsworld

I don’t only run a reverse proxy because of having only a single public IPv4 address, but that probably is the best part

In general, I’d say reverse proxies make things somewhat easier to manage, especially when it comes to TLS. No need for every service to integrate it.

That would have been a brilliant move with wav vs MP3

How would a new format be backwards-compatible? At least JPEG-XL can losslessly compress standard jpg for a bit of space savings, and servers can choose to deliver the decompressed jpg to clients that don’t support JPEG-XL.

Also from Wikipedia:

Computationally efficient encoding and decoding without requiring specialized hardware: JPEG XL is about as fast to encode and decode as old JPEG using libjpeg-turbo

Being a JPEG superset, JXL provides efficient lossless recompression options for images in the traditional/legacy JPEG format that can represent JPEG data in a more space-efficient way (~20% size reduction due to the better entropy coder) and can easily be reversed, e.g. on the fly. Wrapped inside a JPEG XL file/stream, it can be combined with additional elements, e.g. an alpha channel.

That doesn’t help you if you want to get the result of something that happened in the function without capturing stdout, does it?

I didn’t mean that bash has no local variables, but rather that if you want to use a function as such without capturing stdout, you need variables that are scoped across your functions, which is usually global or at least effectively global.

Bash has its upsides too, like the fact that it has arrays / lists and dictionaries / hashmaps. In my opinion, it gets iffy though when you need to do stuff with IFS; at that point one might be better off just using specialized tools.

Not saying working bash isn’t good enough, but it can break in very surprising ways is my experience.

Functions are definitely not subshells in Bash

You’re right, my bad, I got this mixed up with something else.

Not sure I’d call what bash has functions. They’re closer to subroutines in Basic than functions in other languages, as in you can’t return a value from them (they can only return their exit code, and you can capture their stdout and stderr). But even then, they are full subshells. It’s one of the reasons I don’t really like Bash, you’re forced into globally or at least broadly-scoped variables. Oh, and I have no clue right now how to find where in your pipe you got a non-null exit code.

It’s not a big problem for simple scripting, but it makes things cumbersome once you try to do more.

In all seriousness though, the core of the technical stack has become very robust in my opinion (DNS being the exception). From a hobbyist’s perspective, things work much better than when the Web was still young. I can run multiple sites (some of them being what are today called apps) on a domain with subdomains, everything fast, HTTP3-capable, secured via valid free TLS certs, reverse proxied, all of that running on a system deployed in minutes…

If you focus on the part of the Internet that you have control over, it’s a lot better than back in the simple days.

On the other hand, why they actually enjoy this, regardless of the reasons, why would they stop?

Sony could just have ignored this

Yeah Rust is super toxic indeed, bit I think that’s part of the appeal

It’s a PC after all, and Valve has access to chipsets the average consumer normally doesn’t. I can see me upgrading my current rig with this if it competes with traditional PCs