You mean NixOS? Well, it’s definitely not as polished as pmOS, but most things do work. My gf is using it as an LTE-enabled music player, and I’m using it to ssh into my servers when I’m out and about.

It required some hackery to get GPS and the modem to work, but then it’s mostly similar to pmOS. I need to find some time to sit down, clean up my config and publish it somewhere, but life’s main quest line is preventing any side projects rn.

If you can get it for not too much money, I’d definitely spring for it. Even if you find it doesn’t suit your daily needs (it probably doesn’t just yet), it will at least be a fun toy for playing with mobile linux.

OnePlus 6/6T + PostmarketOS (I run NixOS on mine but I’m weird). Seriously.

This seems to be an opt-in, user-supplied field that apps can use to implement parental controls easier. If you’re gonna do birth dates at all, this is the way.

But IMO it should be more granular: there should be fields for WWW access, social media access, sex/nudity/violent content, and apps should respect those individually. Then parents can choose what is appropriate for their child at their development level.

To expand on the other comment, Luddites were not necessarily against technological progress. Rather they used destruction of certain types of machinery as a political tool: to temporarily extend their power as skilled laborers, and to intimidate the factory owners into recognizing their unions or getting certain laws passed. Most Luddites were not against technological progress in general.

They’re writing a new package manager/build system and bootloader. So I guess mostly NIH, which is totally fine by me.

BTW Guix+Hurd, a fully GNU OS, has been around for quite a while now: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/a-hello-world-virtual-machine-running-the-hurd. You can even run it on real hardware: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2024/hurd-on-thinkpad/

Heh, that is really quite old. There might be a chance.

See if you can get by with a combination of Krita and GIMP. The former especially has improved a lot lately and is now a fairly professional tool.

New-ish versions of Photoshop are very difficult to run in WINE (which allows you to run some Windows apps natively - it’s the thing that powers all recent linux gaming advances). The best you can do is run it in a VM with a window passthru, like so: https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

Depends on what you need from your computer. If it’s just web browsing and some light “office-like” tasks, it’s very easy, especially if you’ve interacted with a computer before. If you need some specialized hardware support or rely on some complicated proprietary app (looking at you Adobe), it can get complicated quickly.

In any case there will be some pain as you get accustomed to the new OS. But overall it’s not as bad as it used to be.

Oh my, I hope she knows how to sed the release name in /etc/apt, or else it’s very out of date by now…

BTW this is also the case for most network printers. You can just print to them by sending a pdf/postscript file with netcat. CUPS is rarely needed nowadays.

In my experience:

1. All printers are pain. This is a sad fact of computers.
2. If it detects&gets recognized in CUPS, you can usually fiddle with it and make it work eventually.
3. If it works on one distro, there will be some way to hack it enough for it to work on all distros.

I think if you have some use-case that Wayland doesn’t fulfill, it’s totally fine to just pin some version of Plasma and stick with it. Maybe even switch to Trinity. Chances are it will keep working for like a decade or more.

I still use kdenlive 18.08, because I know how to use that version, and it does what I need it to do perfectly well. They broke something I needed in 19.whatever (I don’t remember what it was anymore), so I just pinned it and kept using it ever since. Maybe one day I’ll try to figure out the latest version, but there’s no real incentive for me to do so.

For context, I’m using NixOS, not Arch, but it’s a similar enough idea. I have a tiling/tabbed WM configured just the way I like it, and a window switcher thingy, and it makes juggling hundreds of windows really easy and quick. Combined with a terminal-based editor, a custom setup for my shell, and direnv for easy environment switching, I can be switching between a dozen different projects within a single day (sadly a requirement for my work right now).

Whenever I look at how my colleagues with KDE/Gnome are managing their workflows, it makes me appreciate the work I put into my setup a lot.

Also, I have a whole bunch of shell aliases and scripts for tasks I do often.

Sure, you can configure any distro to do that, but things like Ubuntu or Fedora would get in the way. At some point, when you want to choose (or even write) every component of the system and configure it yourself, it’s easier to just build from scratch rather than start with a lot of pre-configured software and remove parts.

My desktop runs nixos, but will be transfered to arch next rebuild.

That’s interesting; any particular reason? I went the other way around (Arch for multiple years -> Gentoo for a year or so -> NixOS for over a decade now), and never looked back.

Is it shown that there are significant performance benefits to installing daemons and utilities à la carte?

No, not really.

Is it because arch users are enthusiasts that enjoy trying to optimize their system?

This is IMHO the most important aspect. The thing they’re trying to optimize isn’t performance, though, it’s more “usability”, i.e. making the system work for you. When you get down to it and understand all the components of the OS, and all the moving parts within, you can set it up however you prefer and then combine them in novel ways to solve your tasks more quickly.

aerc

To this day i still plug my wh-mx10004 … (Or whatever their stupid number is cause sony thinks a ten digit alphanumeric code is the catchiest name for their products…) b/c every time they connect by bt they will ONLY do ‘handsfree’ codec, yknow, the one that sounds like shit for phone calls. I have done everything… pavucontrol, pipewire, wireplumber, blueman, cli system level shit and yes i can force it to proper high def audio after some really annoying steps… but then ill start up a game or something and it suddenly goes “nope! This calls cor handset audio!” And switches itself back.

If you’re talking about WH-1000XM4, they work for me. Sometimes on first connect they only have mSBC codec for me too, but if I just disconnect/reconnect them then all other codecs appear. If I switch to SBC-XQ or LDAC they then work fine until I turn them off (which can be hours and many different playback streams). I’m on pipewire+pipewire-pulse.

I’ve heard about Linux being highly customizable and decentralized OS, and suddenly I can’t define my own shortcuts because there is a list of un-features?

You can customize it to do whatever you want. Heck, you can write your own terminal emulator that does exactly what you need. But some things can be harder to do than others and require skills and experience. Once someone implements those harder things, they become a “feature”. Before then, therefore, they are an “un-feature”. See https://xkcd.com/1349/

E.g. it is probably possible to set up your shell to use shift-selection for the command you’re currently editing, but shift-selection for the output of a previous command will require terminal support. You will have to make sure that the two don’t interfere with each other, which can be quite complicated.

I already have my workflow and I’m trying to transfer it to Linux

Linux is a different OS that, by default, does things differently from others. You can configure it to emulate some other UX, but it won’t necessarily be easy. In the meantime, you can install the micro editor, set EDITOR=micro, and then Ctrl+x Ctrl+e in bash to edit the command in a more familiar setting.

I prefer compose keys because they are easier to remember.

Oh, also, I think GTK apps have that Ctrl+shift+U thing which allows you to enter characters by code. Never really got used to it though.