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“Stop using electricity” - Suanpan Abacus Tutorial for Beginners
Can you imagine taking someone from MacOS and giving them NixOS?
user: Great, June 2026, Upgrade time! What do I click on?
NixFriend: Umm, sorry you’re going to need to open your terminal and change your nix-channels to https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-26.06 and you’re going to need to do it under sudo.
user: umm, ok, now i’m upgraded?
NixFriend: no, not quite, you need nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
user: ohh jeeze, ok. umm, i got an error, a couple hundred lines it’s kind of vague about a bunch of functions failing
NixFriend: Go back up 70-80 lines and see if it calls out a certain package being a problem, just ignore all the messages about variables not being set.
user: ohh wow, yeah, ok, something about pinentry and specifying ncurses and some messages about name deprecation
NixFriend: ohh yeah ok, that’s pretty easy, go edit these text files, change all the names if mentions and either remove pinentry or just make or leave in pinentry-ncurses
user: Ohh ok; Now it’s complaing that /boot is full
How’d your 25.11 channel migration go, fellow Nix-enjoyer?
Second-best ever. 25.05 was seamless.
I only needed to screw with mesa, pinentry, vim-full, and unpin my kernel for v4l which is now fixed in OBS
I’m preparing to break out my configurations so that all my machines can share parts of them and maybe see if I can get my home .confgs a little more managed under home manager.
How was yours?
Pretty well. I did have to create an “old-nixpkgs” variable for some of my packages (deadbeef is currently broken in 25.11 and warsow was removed). Rebuilt my configs on my work laptop, gaming desktop, and 1 of my servers without a hitch. Will wait on my DB server until my next offsite backup just in case…
Wow, thank you for this comment! I was pondering maybe setting up a trial for NixOS at work, but now I see we just don’t have the manpower to handle that.
Nope. I was thinking of doing an immutable server with it because that would be neat AF.
But the updates are deprecated way too soon. You really need to take the latest milestones really close to when they happen.
I run it myself at work for a couple of years now, but I wouldn’t want to support the userland on it, even the technically competent ones.
This is real sad news. I was hoping it would allow for a “Intune-like” experience for people, where they’d just download the configs dynamically as needed.
give em time, given they’re not young by any standard, but they are starting to gain traction which should help bring about advances.
lol yeah Nix is definitely not for everyone, but an insane flexible tool when you know how to use it.
My favorite part is syncing one file and my home folder and moving from one computer to another seamlessly.
I’ve moved hardware three times and always been right back in service.
I tried NixOS for a solid month, didn’t click for me, so now I’m on gentoo. I’ll have to try it again someday.
I absolutely adore doing shell.nix environments and flakes. I basically don’t have anything installed that I don’t need on a daily basis. I use syncthing to keep a folder full of shell environments backed up.
cd /nixShells/video nix-shell
BOOM, I have yt-dlp, ffmpeg-full, mpv, timg, kdenlive, python 3.12 with a bunch of subrip and AI subtitle generators. I do what is needed and exit and it’s all gone.
I keep one for wine, one for mp3, one for parsec, one for video
Then I have flakes for real development work.
admittedly, it’s a lot :)
Don’t worry. I tried it for about 2 years and didn’t quite get the hang of it. Back on Arch now. NixOS really has a steep learning curve and not nearly enough documentation.
If you want to explore other immutable and declarative OSes – as well –, you could take Guix for a spin, too (and you can install things such as proprietary software with the NonGuix software repository, in case that’s a concern any).
unironically this shit is so prevalent in the programming community that I can’t help to laugh and shrug it off
remember: YouTubers are just that, most of them don’t even work with the tech they gloat about
and for devlopment tools/frameworks/dependencies the mantra is: boring tech works, just remember that it needs to be currently supported/developed
I think it’s just clickbait/being hyperbolic. I imagine the videos themselves are just normal tutorials or intros to the topic.
I see it goes full circle, FreeBSD from MacOS (which has a lot of BSD code)
I was gonna say that’s a long walk to get back to a BSD based system lol
which has a lot of BSD code
But less MacOS.
“2027 edition”
year of the BSD desktop
ah yes the TempleOS zealots are prostyltizing again
all their videos are like that, they seem pretty cool and they made their own window manager.
The next video is going to be called stop existing.
How is this the first time I hear about mangoWC?
my WC smells more like lemon, I guess it just depends on what you clean it with
I’ve never heard of mangowc, and I’m scared of falling down another rabbit hole after cycling through so many window managers just to end up with sway again. I will not relapse.
Like Hyprland AND want to try Niri at the same time? BOOM MangoWC. Been using it for months now. Don’t ever see myself going back to Hyprland. Completely bypassed the Niri hype too. It has tiling and scrolling modes. You can toggle between them. Just as smooth as Hyprland without all the bloat. Plus whenever someone says something about some window manger or DE you can now respond, ‘no thank you, I’ll have the Mango.’
If you stay on X, you can keep using the same window manager for longer. My XMonad config is over a decade old, and I bet my old dwm config.h still compiles.
Every time you install Linux, Linus clips a penguin’s wings.
Think of the penguins. Stop using Linux.
And careful with those unix systems. Every time someone compiles Minix, Andrew Tanenbaum shaves a raccoon’s ass.
Hah too bad I’m using GNU Hurd
I’ve got a host running FreeBSD, I use it for pfsense. It’s probably my most reliable machine. Limited use case but would recommend.
Reminds me of the time I ran a FreeBSD webserver from home, compiling Apache from source took the better part of a day. But still good times, learned a lot from that experience.
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Counterintuitively, something stops being magic the moment there is a guide for it.
For example, I am a wizard because I installed linux on an old inspiron tower with no display output during boot menu, relying entirely on instinct and mysticism to navigate the nonexistent menu with precise timing.
Does remembering my starcraft cd key count?
It is granted, Acolyte.
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Or they’re bored. I’ve done Linux From Scratch before. It’s fun. It’ll teach you a lot about building and maintaining a distro.
Do it. Take a weekend, and indulge yourself.
How long does it reasonably take? Just a weekend?
It’s all subjective and based on your personal level of interest. From a technical standpoint the time needed is based on how fast your computer can compile everything, how fast you read and understand the instructions, and how much effort you want to put into it.
So yeah, a weekend could be reasonable.
One month, got it.
When I last set up LFS it took a week, but I read everything. I was doing it to better understand how Linuxes work
…that was a full week, it would have taken much longer had I had other things to do
I would be doing it to learn as well. I’m pretty good with Linux, I work for Red Hat. But, I don’t get down in the weeds at all. I do mostly Ansible and OpenShift.
