That's exactly how nixos went for me you feel like you understand it and then went to go and look at old configs after awhile and was like what in the fuck and rewrote the whole thing but once you figure it out it's pretty easy to keep learning
I've been searching for so long for a way to have my software and configs and project deps tracked in a way that doesn't have me setting things up every time I switch to a new machine or--worse--opening an old project. I found some things that get me most off the way there like docker, rtx/mise, direnv, stow, or the package manager for whatever language I'm working in at a time. Still, nothing quite does what I need.
I tried our NixOS and have it on three machines as well as Nix on WSL. It took a while for me to figure it out, especially moving to flakes and separating user config out to home-manager. But it was fun enough to try and fail and fail and fail then succeed that I kept going. I think it might be what I'm looking for. I was able to set up a new machine by just cloning a repo and any time I cd into a project on NixOS or a remote Linux server or even Windows with WSL, everything is just ready for me. Do wish it were fully POSIX compliant, though.
I know this is from more of a developer perspective, but even for gaming and graphics I've never had an easier time getting Nvidia drivers set up.
I promise I'm not shilling. I still have a lot to learn. I think I made it past the cliff on this meme but I might be surprised.
Yeah, no. Windows is the easy starter but the more you get experience, the more you fight the system.
Or you go the Linux approach and set your tooling up from start via third-parties from Chocolatey/Scoop. Guess the red line represents this.
There's been a couple forks but that's not all. They are made votes to massively restructure their governance system. Things are looking up on the main nixos branch!
I don't think I will ever feel comfortable learning NixOS since they accepted a sponsorship from Anduril until there was community backlash. Anduril performs violent border survailence for the US government and are responsible for a huge amount of death and suffering.
I'm with you in some cases. Who you take money from is not the same as who you give money or support to, necessarily. I think the worry in this case is that it's a surveillance company.
I have Dwarf Fortress on my wishlist and while it's cheap to pick up...yeah that looks like X4 levels of complexity but in 2d. Not sure if I'll ever be ready for that, haha.
So if you've played Rimworld it'll feel familiar. Much more complex but part of that complexity is because you can traverse the Z axis, and make multi-level fortresses. I don't think Tarn has ever recoded to allow multi thread processing, so everything runs on a single CPU core (my info may be out of date). If that's still the case At any rate, the end of every fortress (that doesn't succumb to a mood spiral or a were-beast or an elf invasion or the circus or forgetting to pack an anvil or vampires or a cavern collapse) is fps death. Usually from cats. But remember, losing is fun!
Amazing news and you love to hear it! I'm so happy Tarn and Zach get to benefit from their passion project. TBH i haven't played since they introduced magic. I got distracted by other things. But I 100% bought it through steam as soon as it was released, just out of appreciation
I also wanna say that the Steam version packages a full tutorial which will get you off the ground and also cleaned up a lot of the old game logic that was inconsistent and confusing (like how some rooms were "rooms" and others were "zones" and still others were "places"), and now I'd say that getting a base up and running is pretty intuitive since most things work just about the way you'd expect them to and it's only "hard" if you intentionally make it that way by embarking on a dangerous biome or doing a challenge run.
You'll still die a lot though, 'cuz that's the fun part.
As someone who loves it, It's less a game and more a story generator. Until the company was hired to do the nicer graphics and interface for the Steam version it was a math PhD and his brother programming it as a work-in-progress complete fantasy world simulator. It still is but now it's prettier. It feels very comfortable to call it the most complex game on Steam. Rimworld and Minecraft among others took direct inspiration from it, he's been working on it awhile.
Famous patch notes include fixing cats dying from alcohol poisoning because they walked through a puddle of beer before cleaning themselves, egg yolk and egg white having different fluid densities, and nerfing mer-people farming because that's just disturbing.
Well i do need to do a quick ol distro hop cos currently on manjaro and well im not particularly happy with it. I like debian headless on mer server so might jump to sonthing based on that, this graph isnt making nix look like a good choice tho pls enlighten me to the benefits
manjaro was terrible when I used it (several years ago), imo it is fundamentally broken. I would suggest trying a smoother arch install. I always recommend endeavoros because I had an effortless experience with it.
Arch from scratch installed fine for me and ran great. EndevourOS threw errors during install and the desktop was littered with random popup errors...tried it twice a few years apart and Endevour was a poor experience with a janky looking UI
If you don't already know the benefits it's unlikely it solves a problem you have.
Even among its users many are using it because it's cool rather than because they actually need it.
It's a declarative system, meaning you can describe how it should be setup (using a magic strings you have to look up online) and then it "sets up itself" according to the description.
It's normally something you'd use for mass and/or repetitive deployments.
It's usefulness for a single system is debatable, considering you can achieve very close to 100% of "reproducibility" anyway by copying /home and /etc and fetching a copy of the package list.
Where the prescriptive approach is supposed to help is when you attempt to reproduce the system a long time later, after things like config files and packages have changed. But it doesn't help with /home, it hasn't been tested over long intervals, and in fact nobody guarantees long term compatibility for Nix state.
Nix is not place that you want to go just for the hell of it.
If you want to be able to store your entire operating system config in a repo, and spread it to a bunch of other boxes, and have the ability to rollback to any point in your install history, it's the bee's knees.
But to do that, you need to rely on there massive community repository of apps understand their language, and be ready to fight with most uncommon packages that you might want. You can't just install or upgrade apps anymore. Upgrading channels to get app updates as much less likely to go smoothly.
Overall for me, NixOS is a net positive but it's not by that much. If I were going to go from scratch again I'd probably just go back to Debian. But, sunk cost fallacy I'm in it now and I need a good reason to get out of it.
Was thinking same. I always think windows is the easiest to get used from beginning, but that could be cause windows was the first operating system i was dealing with. Playing with the amiga 3000 could be the start, but there i was only 5
Windows XP wasn't exactly intuitive to me and now only I know what my keybinds for Hyprland are so um maybe you're right. Honestly switching to Ubuntu made things a lot easier for me than they were on windows because it was easier to change settings and similar just by using terminal commands rather than a weird gui or not at all.
Does this graph mean what it is supposed to mean for the joke to work? The black line means I learn much quicker with less time investment, i.e. it is easier than all the others.
That is a common misunderstanding of how learning curves work. A steep learning curve means your skill increases more rapidly with the invested time. That means the subject is easier or more intuitive.
'If you change the axis then it makes sense' is not a great argument 🙂 but it does not matter, it is just a joke after all, so let's not argue. Have a nice day y'all!
You nearly had it. The black line starts higher at "gaining skill" so it requires more skill to start learning but after short time you are gaining much more skill in the same time.