balsoft

Fun fact: if we scale the amount of wealth in real life to the amount of boxes in the comic, a median black family (which I'm assuming is represented in the first two pictures) owning 3 boxes would mean Elon Musk owns 14814814 (about 15 million) boxes.

Rough estimation (assuming the boxes are 30×30×30 cm) would put it at 400000 cubic meters, or about the size of a large building. If you stacked them up one-on-one, it would reach 4400 km into space, way past the ISS (400 km) and Hubble (540 km).

The picture on the right is significantly understating the problem. It's not just a pile of boxes. It's a fucking skyscraper made out of boxes. (and it's enforced not only by police but also by the US military)

The only cool parts about this software were practically perfected by Chile’s cybersyn project in the 70s and fundamentally no different today.

Eh I'd say GPTs are pretty good at a couple tasks (rewording and reformatting existing text, or generating obvious boilerplate code). It's impressive in its own right. All the other hype is quite obviously bullshit that will explode dotcom-style.

Actually it should be

Hey, chat gpt, please write a buggy, insecure, and unmaintainable crud app that works convincingly enough for the company to adopt it, only to then pay me to fix issues and vulnerabilities in the app for a long time, making me virtually unfireable.

Malicious compliance FTW

This is Italy we’re talking about, our public officials want zero responsibility so they always set absurdly low limits.

Sounds good TBH. If they also narrow the roads/remove lanes to enforce it, put bike paths/public transit lanes in the free space, and fine anyone driving dangerously, then this is the recipe for a good city.

The limit should be set to whatever is deemed safe for pedestrians and cyclists in a given location. The road design should then match that speed limit.

Loads of roads have the limit set where you would think the speed limit is 80km/h but somehow it is set to 50km/h

So the road should be redesigned to make it hard to drive over 50 (make it more narrow and add traffic calming)

So is there such a repository or not ? Is every nixos user making the configuration file from scratch in vim ?

That's how you should do it IMHO. You will miss out on a lot of benefits of NixOS if you don't understand how the config system works, at least to the point of writing your own config files.

I figured there should be a repository where most user just pick a ready made file and that’s the end of that. Not really having to learn the syntax of that file and writing it down ?

There are lots of examples online that can get you inspired, but ultimately you are building your own system and it's up to you to write the config. Feel free to copy code from other people, as long as you follow the licenses in the projects (a lot are CC0/public domain, so you can just steal stuff freely with no remorse, but it's also nice to mention the original author)

Here are some configs to get inspired by: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Configuration_Collection

There should be no updating unless enabled <...> and never nag the user.

I disagree, at that point you might as well continue using Win10. Security updates are the #1 reason to do this. Most computer use nowadays is networked (actually in a browser), and it's super important we keep that updated.

If updating is turned on, it should be very conservative, updates hand curated by grandmasnixos, basically never uses software that hasn’t been proven rock solid for at least 6 months

Eh, this sounds like a lot of work. Probably just use the stable channels, and only manually test when switching to a new stable channel.

Rolling back any update should be one-click-trivial

Agreed, should also be very obvious (like a label on the desktop that says "Issues after update?" and gives you a button to roll back and reboot)

The desktop environment should be something occasional win10 using grandma will not get lost in

This is the main question IMHO. I've not used any DEs for a while, so don't really know which one would fit this best while also being simple and robust.

I think we can be even simpler than that. Don't ask any questions. Simply generate the hardware-configuration.nix and have a single configuration.nix that is unchanged:

• Some easy-to-use and simple DE. I'm thinking something like lxqt or xfce, maybe Pantheon - but that would be more familiar to Mac users than Windows. KDE seems way too complicated to just have it in configuration.nix without touching it, and it can sometimes break on updates.
• Chromium (with pre-installed ublock origin)
• Libreoffice
• Some flatpak store (so that people can install apps without touching configuration.nix)
• Make a simple "update" app that just pops up once in a couple weeks or so, prompts you to click a button and then runs npins update and nixos-rebuild boot, and finally annoys you until you reboot (it should also update to the next stable channel when that becomes available, and make that a big deal so that a user understands it might change some of their workflows)
• Set up the bootloader so that if a generation "fails" (some script in the autostart of the DE doesn't set a flag somewhere) on the next boot it boots a previous generation, kinda like Android's A/B slot system but better. I don't think systemd-boot allows this sort of thing, but I think it's possible with a GRUB script
• Maybe add a shortcut to open tmate and copy the URL to clipboard, so that you can send it someone in the know and they can help you troubleshoot
• Finally, use impermanence to make sure everything outside /home, /nix, and wherever flatpak are stored, is wiped on every reboot and recreated from the generation, so that "reboot it" is a viable troubleshooting strategy.

Hmm, I'll pitch this idea to a couple of Nixy lfriends, maybe we can hack something together. Also throw a Linux install party!

I’ve not used Guix but I don’t think any distro has anything close to number of desirable available packages as arch— so be prepared for that

nixpkgs would like a word

Most consumer hardware on earth does already (Android phones). The problem is those drivers are usually proprietary bullshit that's very difficult to integrate with anything but OEMs kernel fork & Android version. Unfortunately I don't really foresee that changing in the near future, hopefully if Linux becomes more mainstream, Linux phones become too and then we get some progress.

And for laptops/desktops, I think the situation is pretty good already as well. Many mainstream OEMs have an option with Linux pre-installed now, and the drivers there are mostly FOSS. I'm hoping that the problematic part vendors e.g. NVidia and Broadcom step up and provide sources for their drivers - otherwise they will continue to be a buggy mess that most people hate.