Thank you for the correction. It was 2 years ago + I was really inexperienced so I could be misremembering things and/or just have been doing things incorrectly

Disclaimer: I only tried NixOS for less than a month when I was a complete Linux noob, I have since then been daily driving Arch Linux for about 2 years now.

For me, at least on the surface level, NixOS just felt like Arch Linux, with more similarities than differences.

What was nice about NixOS was the single config file for everything, although iirc I had to reboot every time for it to be applied while with Arch you can just install something and run it immediately.

Edit: I either remembered it wrong or I was doing it wrong because you don’t have to reboot the whole system according to the reply from hallettj.

What I didn’t like however was all the packages that got installed (through the list in the config file) had really strange directories which I couldn’t find easily.

like on Arch the packages and the executables are basically all at /usr/lib/ and /usr/bin/ and iirc it was pretty much the same on NixOS, except on Arch I’ll have usr/lib/firefox but on nix it would be usr/lib/u123uadqasd782341kasjhiu3sh932s9sdasdsapzxcqw-firefox

Another thing is that it works great for everything you install through the Nix config file, but it’s not necessarily going to clean up any files created by programs that got installed through it when you remove the packages from the config file.

Like say you have installed steam and then you install some game through steam, well that game wasn’t added through the config file so there’s no guarantee that if you decide to remove steam that you will also remove whatever the programs steam installed or if they created some new files somewhere.

Of course the same thing already happens on other OSes as well, so you could say that it’s an upside that Nix is better at cleaning up after itself whenever you remove something, but also because it’s supposed to all be controlled through a single config it just feels that much worse when you have to hunt down some file somewhere.

Again these are mostly my anecdotes from 2 years ago when I was a complete noob. Maybe I wouldn’t have any issues if I tried it today. And chances are I was just trying to do something you shouldn’t even be doing.

Plus at the start I used KDE Plasma 5 on Nix and Arch, maybe it will go better if I use i3wm on NixOS like I’ve been doing for a year and half or so on Arch now.

At least I’m pretty sure that having daily driven Arch for 2 years now I would have much better chances with NixOS now than when I tried it with 0 experience on Linux.

So since you’ve already got the experience from using EndeavorOS you might not have any big problems using NixOS, or at least learn how it works pretty fast.

How does it compare to PollyMC? It was super easy to use and you can play both offline without an account but also online with a Mojang Account. (Java versions)

Admittedly I didn’t actually try to play it online since I just looked it up for a nephew.

I used the Linux AppImage, just download and run it and you’re good (might have to install new java runtime depending on what you have already), but there’s also Windows and Mac versions.

p.s. I’m not really into Minecraft and don’t know what’s up, but apparently there’s some drama or something and PollyMC (with 2 'L’s) is not to be confused with PolyMC (one ‘L’).

yay -Syu

you don’t use yay do you

Edit: typing yay without any other argument defaults to yay -Syu so there’s no reason to type it out

the date-time in the top left corner looks weird. The numbers are all greyed out except for only a small section

7z x yourfile -odirectory

So one thing I’ve started getting worried about is whether youtube/google will eventually block/delete youtube/google accounts who use adblockers.

I don’t really care about my youtube account but I have several gmail accounts and losing those would be awful.

I assume they won’t ever go that far, but just the possibility is scary.

So is there an easy way to migrate all your stuff to some other email service and what are some good ones?

:q!

you mean ZQ

Happens to me all the time 😅

And since I’m already holding down ctrl I’ve formed a habit of using ctrl + shift + v even though just regular ctrl + v works. Although for me it’s mostly positive as I usually just want the text without formatting anyway.

and ZZ for save & quit

same

I would recommend Arch and derivatives (supposedly EndeavourOS is Arch but better for beginners, I’ve never used it though) or NixOS, they’re highly configurable & have good package managers.

I would not recommend debian or it’s derivatives because apt package manager is way worse than pacman.

Also while Arch is a rolling release OS, it’s not really unstable, it’s not like it constantly breaks with updates.

I’ve used Linux Mint a bit at a relative’s house so they can have an easier & more “stable” GUI experience, but there weren’t all the packages I needed on the GUI software manager, and even some packages that existed didn’t want to install until I used the terminal anyway.

And as I mentioned earlier apt is just a worse package manager than pacman so it’s a pain to use.

Especially since I was using plain Bash without good tab completion unlike Fish or Zsh, which makes the much longer apt commands that much more annoying to type in compared to just -Syu -S -Ss -Qs -Rns.

And it’s not just that the commands and package names are better and shorter on pacman compared to apt, but there’s more packages (and I’m not even counting AUR).

For example, on Linux Mint I were going to install wine-mono and wine-gecko, which you’re going to want if you plan to play windows games outside steam proton, but they didn’t exist and I had to follow the https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono and https://wiki.winehq.org/Gecko installation guides instead of just downloading 2 binaries through pacman.

And tbh I eventually gave up on wine-mono and just got the .net runtimes I needed through winetricks.

If you’re really supper worried and paranoid then instead of Arch you can use NixOS, it’s whole shtick is that you can have multiple versions and always roll back to before anything broke.

I love fish.

Sometimes I wonder why people think using the terminal is so hard, then every once in a while when I’m not on my home PC and have to use Bash I get reminded of why

I’ve been meaning to try zsh since it can supposedly do everything fish can while still being posix compliant, but I’ve never felt the need to not be using fish so I just never got around to it

I don’t like any DEs, tbh both KDE Plasma and Cinnamon felt worse than Win7 DE. And I’ll never ever even try Gnome

But I absolutely love WMs, I use i3wm

I think it’s probably also because people leave lemmy.world and lemmy.ml

Neovim

I never figured out how to disable DXVK so eventually I just made a 2nd wine prefix without DXVK for games I run in OpenGL.

However if your GPU doesn’t even support Vulkan then you shouldn’t be using DXVK at all so why would you not want to disable dxvk?

Unrelated but the Activate GNOME watermark is just some kind of meme of Activate Windows, right?

Doesn’t it already? At least when it comes to games

I always use yay so I can easily find and use the history, the only time I use pacman without yay is to check the man page