Start with a portable hard drive which only has one job “store a copy of your critical data”.

• move the drive as infrequently as possible, especially when it’s turned on.
• only ever write to it when you do your periodic backup.
• only plug it in when you need to read from or write to it.

It’s a paranoid set of rules, but if this data is critical, this is a good idea. Even better is to have an additional copy of that data in cloud storage.

As far as operating system, you absolutely can use a Linux machine, but learning a new system risks you accidentally deleting data so be careful. Linux has ways of reading windows-formatted hard drives, so as much as I prefer Linux, I would say don’t try new things on the machine which hold critical data.

I recommend starting with basic operations, like:

• putting installed files in the right directory structure.
• integrity checking.
• archiving and compressing.

Decide whether your package manager is source-based, or if you’re going to make some kind of binary distribution mechanism. Either way, you’re going to need a process for configuring, compiling and installing packages from source.

I do recommend looking at how Pacman, & apt approach all this. There are also likely books on this topic.

Also recommend playing around with buildroot; not because it is a comprehensive package manager, but because it’s inner workings are very transparent.

Is this on a fresh install, or have you installed a Wayland DE on an existing distro? If so, you may be missing some packages. What DE are you using for both X and Wayland?

I’m surprised wlr-randr is missing a display that xrandr can see, they should be looking at the same place for the display info. If you hunt through dmesg do you see any errors related to “EDID”?

The past is definitely not a guide for how to achieve a future society or how that society should look, but it does remind us that a society without a state can exist.

It’s not the hard part, but when we’re told that thoughts of a stateless society are fantastical it’s good to remember that it has been done before.

I use NixOS, but it is not for learning how Linux works; realistically it’s for when you already know how Linux typically works, so you can understand when it breaks some of those norms.

If you want to learn how containers etc work, use straight-up Debian.

I really don’t recommend arch for a server. On a desktop absolutely but what I want for a server is to be able to let it sit for 6 months, then update it and not have everything break; arch works best with frequent update hygiene.

I used nushell for a good 6 months, it was nice having structured data, but the syntax difference to bash which I use for my day job was just too jarring to stick with.

Fish was (for me) the right balance of nice syntactic sugar and being able to reasonably expect a bash idiom will work.

1. Software has bugs.
2. Bugs which interface with and execute untrusted code are high risk.
3. Browsers are obscenely large pieces of software, which connect a user’s system with random websites which execute JavaScript.

Browsers are one of the most important things to update on your computer.

We can talk about whether browsers should be as complicated as they are, but implying security updates are a intended as a vector of control is conspiricist thinking.

The reason you don’t get security updates backported to your older release of choice is simple: it is so much work.

Waterfox seems like a good choice, just don’t go around thinking that companies are making security updates in order to sneak in unwanted, they make security updates because they are terrified of being responsible for a major incident.

If any were it’s not like we would know, secrecy being rather important to that kind of activity.

Most GPUs will have fan spin & lights if only on pcie power (the pcie slot provides 75W without external connection), but then misbehave during display; I know it sounds stupid but make sure the 12V power connector on the top of the card is firmly plugged in, that connector in particular has a reputation for being unreliable.

I remember old Tesla and Firepro drivers had a jank, proprietary alternative to SR-IOV but didn’t think any vendor (except Intel with i915’s GVT-g) had an implementation for their consumer devices.

Software to allow partitioning gpu resources among multiple virtual machines instead of just assigning the one PCIe device to a single VM. Very useful for having a single GPU do 3D acceleration on a host and multiple guests at the same time.

Your personal files e.g. ~/Documents are not recreated, you’ll still need backups of those.

caveats are you’ve got to use:

• home-manager to generate your dotfiles.
• something akin to sops to generate and securely store your private keys and secrets.

But all this can be written in the one flake, so yes nixos-install --flake <GIT URL>#<HOSTNAME> Is sufficient for me to rebuild my desktop, laptop or server from the same repository.

I’ve never used Gentoo, and I’m sure there are other methods of achieving the same level of reproducibility but I don’t know what they are.

Nixos can be as modifiable as Gentoo with the caveat being it’s a massive pain in the ass to do some things. I have a flake for making aarch64-musl systems which has been an endeavour, and… It works? I have a running system that works on 2 different SoCs. I do have to compile everything quite often though.

There are efforts to recreate Nixos without systemd, but that’s a huge effort; because it’s very “infrastructure as code”, you have to change a lot of code where editing a build script would’ve sufficed on arch/Gentoo.

As for nix vs guix, guix was described to me as “if you only ever want to write in scheme”, whereas nix feels much more like a means to an end with practical compromises spattered throughout.

Perhaps, but when I accidentally nuked my system by dd’ing to one of the hard drives, being able to install the exact same system back onto it by pointing the installer to my git repository was an excellent experience.

Statically linking is absolutely a tool we should use far more often, and one we should get better at supporting.

Tailscale edits /etc/resolv.conf, since your DNS isn’t working start by making sure that file is how the archwiki suggests rather than what tailscale changes it to.

An uninstalled tailscale may still have left that file modified.

I wish.

It was a bcachefs array with data replicas being a mix of 1,2 & 4 depending on what was most important, but thankfully I had the foresight to set metadata to be mirrored for all 4 drives.

I didn’t get the good fortune of only having to do a resilver, but all I really had to do was fsck to remove references to non-existent nodes until the system would mount read-only, then back it up and rebuild it.

NixOS did save my bacon re: being able to get back to work on the same system by morning.

A few months ago I accidentally dd’d ~3GiB to the beginning of one of the drives in a 4 drive array… That was fun to rebuild.

It seems a lot of new developers want to do some things differently; old guard devs can either make some compromises, or accept that fewer new devs will want to be part of upstream.

Dunno man, when what the dev of 30+ years said was more or less “fuck off”, it seems that advice was in fact heeded

It’s a chicken and egg problem; manufacturers aren’t going to care to upstream drivers if not enough of their users are on Linux, which slows new hardware. It’s much better than it was, but still ongoing.

Amd’s 7000 series amdgpu driver was busted in several ways for like a year post launch, and is still missing tunables for many GPU features.

Manufacturers are capable of making out of tree and unfree modules, but honestly I prefer the slow progress if it means most driver work stays in-tree.