I use nixos on my homeserver, but I'm looking to switch it to Void as well. For me personally I just realized that it's easier to set everything up with shell scripts and docker-compose. But that's just my personal experience, by all means go ahead and try out nixos if you have the time. It has lots of unique features that you can't replicate with "just a bunch of shell scripts". This video does a great job of selling nixos. Maybe my favourite part of nixos is how they make "shortcuts" for a lot of common tasks. For example, setting up a letsencrypt ssl certificate for your webserver with autorenewal can be done in just two lines of config.

Thanks for the info, I'll take a look. "far less modern looking" is a selling point for me haha. Give me those win95-looking gtk2 interfaces!

"everything is a file" is such a godsend. It makes absolutely everything so much easier and intuitive. I remember trying to get an old dot matrix printer to work using a parallel-to-usb adaptor cable. Without reading any documentation or having any prior experience I tried echo testing12345 > /dev/lp0 and it just worked lol. Meanwhile my friend spent like half an hour digging in windows gui settings trying to figure out how to print to a parallel printer.

I also posted about this before, but a while back I had to configure my system so that a non-root user could start and stop a root daemon without sudo. On a runit system all you have to do is change the permissions of some control files and it works. On systemd? When I looked it up, the simplest solution involved writing a polkit policy in javascript 🤮

systemd-regedit

That's just dconf lol. It sounds great in theory -- after all, isn't bringing standardization to a chaotic battlefield of different formats a good thing? But in practice it's absolute garbage. I would much rather just edit a config file. Heck, even if you program uses some obscure config format like xml or something language-specific like .lua or .py, I would much rather take a few minutes to learn the specifics of your format than fuck around with dconf. Fuck dconf.

idk man I use /dev/sdX when running commands interactively and PARTLABELs in my /etc/fstab. All those letters and numbers in UUIDs are too much for my monkey brain to handle lol

Ooh, I've never heard of bcachefs, sounds exciting! I see it supports encryption natively, which btrfs doesn't. Pretty cool!

Personally I've never had any issues with btrfs, but I did start using it only a couple years ago, when it was already stable. Makes sense that you'd stick with zfs tho, if that's what you're used to.

I find myself inventing new curses for those who screwed things up with these overblown, over complex, minimally functional abominations

Gosh, tell me about it. I once tried writing a custom wifi signal strength indicator app that got its information from network-manager. Apparently the only way to programmatically communicate with network-manager is through dbus, which is just terrible. Scarce to no documentation, poor support for any language other than C/C++, and once you do get it working, it's the most disgusting and overly verbose code you've ever seen, just to query the status of the wifi card. Could've exposed the API through raw unix sockets or something, but nope, they had to reinvent the wheel on that one as well.

Just give me vi and the basic configuration files and let me get on with it!

I'll take this opportunity to shill for Void Linux, it sounds like exactly what you're describing. I've been a happy user for like 5 years now. I particularly like how nothing ever breaks, because there's not much to break on such a minimal system.

...well, actually, a few things did break over the years, but most of those were due to user error haha.

Thanks! Memes as education material / propaganda FTW

Obligatory shilling for unar, I love that little fucker so much

• Single command to handle uncompressing nearly all formats.
• No obscure flags to remember, just unar <yourfile>
• Makes sure output is always contained in a directory
• Correctly handles weird japanese zip files with SHIFT-JIS filename encoding, even when standard unzip doesn't

I find that a large number of conspiracy theories are asking the right questions, just not providing the right answers. Does big tech want to control our minds with 5G towers and microchips hidden in covid vaccines? Probably not. Does big tech want to control our minds with social media and invasive advertising? Absolutely. Is the world controlled by a secret society of lizard people? Probably not. Is the world controlled by a not-so-secret society of billionaires and politicians? To a large extent. Even those awful racist or bigoted conspiracy theories start to sound somewhat ~~palpable~~ palatable if you filter out the racist or bigoted part. Do Jews make life for the rest of us miserable by controlling the economy? No. But replace "Jews" with "the owning class", and suddenly it kind of makes sense.

EDIT: Is the government putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay? No. Are corporations putting chemicals in water bottles that turn frogs into hermaphrodites? Literally yes

EDIT PART TWO - ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Palatable, not palpable. Words are hard.

A technology that was made To Stop Criminals™ being used against a political whistleblower? Color me surprised! (thanks for sharing the link btw, didn't know about that)