Post #1846695
2026-04-30 14:59 UTC
Replies (5)
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@jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-30 15:00
@liamoc Reminds me of my student who is using omarchy, and routinely he is unable to reliably navigate to a window that he has open… I'm all for learning how to do fun things with your computer, but damn... lol
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@MartinEscardo@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-30 15:35
@liamoc It also reminds of people who use Arch Linux. They are constantly fiddling with their operating system. I like operating systems that just work. Two examples(*) I like, but are hated by many, are Ubuntu and macOS, in this order. I am sure many other flavours of Linux are likeable too, but life is short. I was among the first users of Ubuntu in 2004, because I had tried every distribution of Linux at that time, and for each of them some piece of hardware wouldn't work. Then a postdoc at my institution told me: "I've got this CD in my post, which claims to be a distribution of Linux which just works in any existing hardware". I tried it, and it solved all my problems 22 years ago. Since then, I use only Ubuntu in my Linux machines. And still, despite all what people complain about, it just works. Other distributions are not bad at all. It is just that I would have to learn their different ways, and I have no time, patience or interest in learning them. If I could use just Linux, I would. It just works, particularly with Ubuntu. And Windows is a no-no, because things are just ugly in every respect. (*) Well, these two examples do give trouble sometimes. But only rarely. @jonmsterling
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@jac@types.pl 2026-04-30 16:53
@liamoc I think this is correlation rather than (or actually as well as) causation. I know someone of the sort, who uses Nix but not NixOS, but also really loves thinking about config. And tbh I've sometimes over-optimized. I use NixOS because it "just works" and everything is remarkably easy to configure and doesn't randomly break. And I use Nix because we can guarantee pinned dependencies, and nonsense like patched LLVM (I'm sure they'll patch those crashes someday) and I don't have to keep track of some random dependency installed somewhere that might change. I think there's a correlation in that if you use Nix(OS) it's significantly easier to try for insane setups and be able to manage the complexity. And people who like that also tend to be happy to explore new software. Now it kinda sucks for one person, but with two it's great. @jonmsterling
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@DanielRThomas@social.coop 2026-04-30 19:11
@liamoc @jonmsterling My work laptop runs Ubuntu and I am not allowed sudo to install packages with apt, but I am allowed to use Nix with my local user account. Such a ridiculously worse experience than apt...
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@mio@shrimp.mio19.uk 2026-04-30 23:24
@liamoc There might be two groups: one group uses those tools; the other group spending so many time on tools themselves. Maybe only the second group is observed to use Nix