you will get errors on your errors.

Python3: hold my beer

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Dolphin (well, whatever the KDE’s indexer is called) uses xattrs under the hood for tagging, so it will be compatible with other software (including {get,set}fattr).

The index has to be up-to-date, but then that would be true with any tag-based filesystem, it’s just happening on a different layer (and arguably a layer which is more suitable for this - not sure it’d be a good idea to enforce synchronous indexing during xattr writes).

The most significant user-facing obstacle is lack of software which supports this system, but I guess that shows that there’s not much desire for it in reality.

One that stops inviting ideological battles

That’s impossible IMHO. Nix is fundamentally about doing things “the right way”, and so there will always be disagreements about what “the right way” is. I think they are bound to be eventually settled on the best possible answer, you don’t need a fork for that.

The CSS thing might be true, but the swayconfig file is probably a solvable problem, especially with everything being slowly moving to freeform modules. We just need to write a Nix -> swayconfig generator, which shouldn’t be too difficult because swayconfig is not even turing-complete.

You don’t have to waste 30 seconds on a full eval when just iterating, I use these one-liners when trying to get some config file working: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/flake.nix#L140 ; they only evaluate one specific file and then link it into the right location “imperatively”

Then when I get it working I do the nixos-rebuild switch, which is a no-op in terms of home-manager stuff because the link points to the same location, it just makes it so that it stays the same after a reboot (I use impermanence).

I think what you’re looking for is simply an indexer + UI that sorts your filesystem by tags rather than by directory structure. Not sure if that’s as beneficial as you imagine it to be, but IIRC KDE allows you to do something like that in Dolphin.

They provide the same immutability guarantees

Not as easy to have your entire system introspectable, sharable between devices, and under the same VCS. NixOS is declarative first and foremost, and all other benefits fall out from that; immutability is just one of them.

NixOS is a hack that shoehorns existing FOSS software into what an OS should really be. I doubt we’ll get anything better for the foreseeable future, except maybe Guix.

Ah, it’s not the best for cases like that, especially if you need to make different layouts all the time. You can get it to do anything with enough packages and positioning hints, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore. If you just need a dozen of layouts and then fill them out with different content, it’s doable.

I haven’t seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, L^AT_EX for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.

Abstraction, when used well, is actually a tool that produces more simple code in the long run. It separates different concerns into different pieces of code, makes code readable by extracting common logic and giving it a recognizable name, and reduces boilerplate.

That said, OOP-style inheritance-based abstractions, while useful in some cases, quite often lead people down the complete opposite path - mushing together unrelated logic and then making call sites difficult to understand with a lot of hidden state that has to be kept in mind.

So yeah, there’s no exact answer to “what happens to Linux after Torvalds”, it’s more of “who gets to add more maintainers to torvalds/linux.git if nobody merges things in there for 72 hours”. I suppose Linus is confident that the system of distributed maintainers is robust enough to survive his & gregkh’s incapacitation, and the only remaining point of failure is access to the central repo itself. I think he is underestimating the governance upheaval that would happen if he was to disappear, so I hope that he puts some more details about his views on future project governance in writing.

Only if the touchscreen also has a fluffy texture.

That’s true, for me the main issue with any automation under capitalism is that it brings yet more power to the corpos and the billionaires and takes away power from the labor.

In this particular case it also sucks because the end product of genAI is soulless slop, and video genAI is quite a power hog. I agree that it’s ok for assisting developers/writers/artists/video editors in boring repetitive tasks.

I think LLMs are neat and useful tools in some circumstances. So I don’t hate “AI”, I hate the billionaires who are pushing it down our throats, or trying to replace us.

There are some good ideas in there (the main one IMO is structured objects as the main form of IPC, instead of text), but the execution is really bad after XP and maybe 7. They stuck to a lot of legacy garbage in the name of “compatibility”, but in the end it’s an inconsistent mess of dozens of frameworks, and yet many old programs run worse than they do in WINE on Linux. Now with the advent of vibecoding the core components, it’s pretty much over unless they literally start over from an old checkout.

In that case consider your accounts on “everything else” to be compromised already. It can be a pretty significant vector for identity theft for example.

I don’t think they’d ever get people to do the same for the newer OS’s

Just sayin, if you host a Linux install party you can get a copy of most Linux distributions for free. You can also get it for free if you don’t host a Linux install party, but that’s minor details.

The functional elitist is actually running Yi in XMonad on Guix.

Given the potential damage from it, it’s more like saying it can drive while being confident the brake pedal is always the left-most one, because it’d seen it on reddit.

Ground is always there just for safety. It is supposed to be connected to any metal bits on the outside of any device, so that if a live wire touches the outside it just shorts and some fuse blows or circuit breaker trips, rather than providing an unpleasant surprise to anyone who touches it.

Most modern electronics is “double-insulated”, meaning there are at least two layers of reinforced insulating material between any mains-carrying conductors and the user. This is deemed to be safe enough so that those devices don’t need to be grounded, and if the case is plastic then they will almost never be. So if you’re only connecting plastic-cased electronics to the socket, a ground would be superfluous in almost all cases. There might be some exceptions, like power supplies connecting one of the low-voltage pins to ground, but it is quite rare to see.