I generally don’t either, but I do install one when using a terminal that has multiplexing. The ssh multiplexing daemon is part of the kitty binary, so it needs to be installed to work. Not really different than installing Tmux on one.

Kitty can do multiplexing over ssh as well. If you have kitty installed on the remote, you can use Kitty’s builtin ssh wrapper and get a lot of useful features.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/ssh/#opt-kitten-ssh.forward_remote_control

That’s very normal if you don’t have any KDE apps. If you were using KDE and installed a GNOME app it’d be similar.

Not sure what you mean by Zen being a skin. Its a fork in the same way Librewolf and Waterfox are forks.

Maybe my systems aren’t exotic enough to experience the uncommon breakages.

The majority of issues are caused by Python applications, because Python packaging in Nix is still very rough. This isn’t Nix’s fault though, its the fact that pip sucks and most Python software uses a simple requirements.txt. Hopefully one day Poetry and UV build helpers will be in Nixpkgs.

You have to be active in the community to get your work merged in any decent timeframe. I think this is the most annoying part about the Nix ecosystem.

Definitely agree. It can be hard to get things merged or even reviewed. The simplest option to improve this would be to give more people write access, but of course lowering requirements for getting it would be a risk for security and stability. Nixpkgs automation is frequently improving, which will definitely help.

I didn’t say or imply that NixOS is worse than other distros overall. I am also a maintainer of several packages, but I am referring to those with Nixpkgs write access, who generally have a deeper understanding of the repo.

Shit usually works, but not always. Breakages on unstable are not uncommon. For example, things often break when a major Python package is updated. The auto generated packages in Nixpkgs are often broken, sometimes completely, but sometimes in ways you don’t realize until you’re using them. Nixpkgs just does not have a review process that is on par with other distros.

I agree that NixOS configuration is amazing, that’s not what I was talking about. Im not shit talking NixOS, I love Nix and have used and contributed to it for years. I’m just bringing up valid points about it that are worth talking about.

I agree that Nix handles broken packages much better than Arch, but that’s more on the package managers themselves than the quality of packages.

NixOS Unstable has fairly frequent package breakages, especially for Python applications or packages using autogenerated dependencies. There are also many unmaintained packages. These unmaintained packages often get updated automatically without being tested, breaking them. Without a maintainer, some of these take a bit to be fixed.

I do think Nixpkgs packages are on average higher quality than AUR packages, they are just not up to the standards of many other repos official packages. Also, to be clear, I’m not hating on Nix or anything, I love Nix and NixOS is and has been my distro of choice for years.

Rollbacks are definitely something worth talking about, but the package count is probably not.

Nixpkgs automatically generated packages from some language specific package managers, mainly Haskell and Node packages, which do hugely inflate the number. If you account for these, it does end up being smaller than the AUR. Plus, many of those automatically generated packages are frequently broken.

This still leaves Nixpkgs as the largest official repo, but I think any NixOS maintainer would agree that the average quality of a package in NixOS is not as high as something like an official Arch or Debian package. Package review processes are not nearly as intensive as they probably should be due to the lack of manpower to handle that…

Edit: To be clear, since my tone seemed very negative here, I am not just trying to spread negativity about NixOS. I’ve used NixOS for years and contributed to plenty of Nix projects in the time. It is without a doubt the best package manager atm and its ideas have had massive positive impacts on package management as a whole.

That is true, but most NixOS contributors and maintainers would agree that the average package quality is currently closer to that of the AUR than the official repos of other distros. However, there is the upside that because of how dependencies are handled, a broken package won’t mess with other things on your system in the same way a broken AUR package could.

Bazzite is great. Definitely the best distro for gamers new to Linux.

It is important to understand the context of a word. Many words and phrases have racist origins, including many words you likely use without knowing. Meanings change, and that’s not a bad thing. If people hurt by the term pushed for it to stop being used, I would of course respect this. I have never seen who could be targeted with the term be offended by its usage in the Linux community.

Currently, the majority of people who talk about Linux customization call it “ricing”, and none of them are doing it with ill intent. Look at the replies to your comment, most of them didn’t even know this until you brought it up. What is the point in holding onto the negative history of a word that is no longer used in that way?

Cosmic is really great if you want tiling similar to Hyprland or Sway without so much work. I used i3 then Hyprland for years, but have now been using Cosmic for months. Its the only DE that correctly does a tiling workflow imo, even considering extensions.

The problems with preconfigured configs is that they often aren’t very dynamic, as in they don’t adapt well to other PCs. Many of them will use stuff like CSS for widgets and bars that have stuff like specific pixel sizes, meaning you’ll often gave to make changes.

Hyprland has some premade configurations on their wiki if you’d like to try them. I’ve never tried one, if you do, let me know how it goes!

Another thing to remember is a lot of the stuff you take for granted in a DE don’t exist in a WM. Things like autostarts, envvars, background services, etc don’t work the same. Hyprland devs created UWSM which will help with all of this.

tbf, Wayland was hardly relevant for some of that. the first feature request I found was 4 years go. implementing it also required upgrading electron a few versions, so a decent bit of work.

I’ve never used Findroid, but they work on my regular Jellyfin app. I think on Roku transcoding is required, but afaik that’s on Roku not supporting the subtitle format.

I now extract all my subs, but for the first 2 years using it I left everything embedded and it always worked normally. Even with some advanced ones like Jujutsu Kaisen and One Pace, which both use stylized ones.

Discord didn’t take very long to add it at all, what took a long time was fixing audio streaming.

Yes. You set hardware encoding to QSV, then you’re mostly set. You can choose which formats it should work on, which for an Arc card will probably be all of them. I got an Arc A380 and its worked flawlessly with many streams at once.

Fair enough, not saying you should bother with it, just surprised to hear it happening.

I genuinely do not understand the issues people are having with Jellyfin subtitles. I just have Bazarr set up to automatically download and they play on every device (web, android, iOS, roku, android TV) with zero issues.

Embedded subtitles definitely work, and I’ve used bitmap ones before, although I generally avoid them so I’m not sure if they consistently work well. Directly playback also does work with those subtitles, so if you had issues it was likely related to codec support.