featured [he/him]

Well there are compatibility layers but they aren’t perfect. I’ve tried nix-ld, nix-alien, and nix-autobahn and each does work but not necessarily in all cases. I found this to be most common with scripts.

For example, I tried to install the discord mod Vencord using these solutions, but even with the compatibility shell I could not get past the first prompt.

Another issue I had was network authentication. An organization I’m in has a secure network requiring a web portal to sign in, and it uses a python script to get hardware details and install a certificate. This does not work even with FHS compatibility layers. I manually installed all of the python packages it wanted, which got it to launch and immediately crash. On traditional distros, it just works

I’m rambling but yes these tools exist and they may make everything rosy for you, but be aware of their own limitations because they didn’t solve much for me

I wanted to love nixos but it has many shortcomings that aren’t immediately obvious but can really stump you. No FHS compatibility seems fine but certain programs require it and don’t have nix native workarounds. Additionally, the documentation is really not good. I used it for a while but it got in the way too much; now I use a fedora variant and use regular Nix for dev packages using nix-direnv. Gives me the nix features while also having a fully compliant and functional base system

I think you’re better off finding tools which work for your particular language, application, workflow etc. For me I use nix and direnv to create directory based declarative package sets that load upon cd’ing to a project’s folder. This allows me to have exact versions of the packages I need regardless of system packaging or versions used in other projects. Some people prefer spinning up containers for this role, often using tools like distrobox. If the language you’re working in has good version management tooling then you can also just use that

Mozilla.social no longer exists, Mozilla took it down

There is a Unity variant that’s still maintained

Recently, uBlue. It’s more a family of fedora atomic images but it has taken the pain out of immutability for me. I was using Fedora silver blue and later Sericea a while back, but installing codecs from RPMfusion on it never worked properly and my hw acceleration was always broken. I was on NixOS for a while but had sporadic problems that come with NixOS not using an FHS structure. But uBlue just works. Hardware acceleration works out of the box, and I can easily create custom images with BlueBuild. It’s a very nice ecosystem to create a stable, secure, complete base system. And I run nix on top of it for user packages and home-manager to get all the benefits of both worlds

Check out Wayblue, they make some custom universal blue images based off fedora silverblue which includes a hyprland image. I’m running a modified way blue image myself these days and loving it. Technically it’s a secureblue image based on a way blue image but yeah same difference

Was using NixOS but just could not deal with lack of FHS compatibility. Even the workarounds like nix-ld and nix-alien didn’t help with some key scripts I needed to run for secure network verification stuff. So I just migrated to this plus nix/home-manager for my application management

If it’s something that will be mostly interacted with over CLI then kebab case. If GUI then spaces

There is a fully Rust based Unix-like OS out there, it’s called Redox and it’s very cool

Have you tried yabai or amethyst? Both really solid macOS tilers

In other words use a UPS 👍

I started with TrueNAS and it works great. Either regular TrueNAS or TrueNAS scale will suit your needs well, the major difference being that Scale uses a Linux base instead of the FreeBSD of core

I use libvirt to do all my kvm/qemu stuff on my server. Using cockpit-machines web UI as a frontend. On my workstation if I ever need a VM I usually turn to Gnome Boxes for simplicity

ZFS for my server’s root pool and main storage pool. Ext4 with snapraid for my media pool. Currently btrfs on my desktop and ext4 under vanillaos on my laptop (not sure if I could partition it manually to use btrfs but I’m considering that for snapshots)

I’ve loved Linux for college. Studying CS and Math, graduating soon. Just know your requirements software wise and be prepared to find workarounds or dual boot if necessary. I never had to dual boot but I was able to use Google docs or the browser version of office for anything requiring office formatting or collaborative work. I also couldn’t download some testing software on Linux (respondus lockdown browser 🤢) and used a school desktop in the library to run that when necessary. I love my workflow though outside of those niggles and couldn’t ask for a better research and development OS

The equivalent of i3 on Wayland is Sway; it’s even compatible with i3 config files, it’s a true successor. Hyprland is popular because of the eye candy and its rapid adoption of features which patch over some of the gaps in Wayland functionality. However I think those advantages have become fewer and farther, I personally use sway and if I wanted the visuals I’d use the swayfx fork

I use my home server for everything. It’s an i5-13500 system, 48GB of RAM, an RX6650XT, and currently 14 drives all packed into a 4U case.

I virtualize my desktop on it, just passing through the GPU, P-Cores, and 16GB of RAM. That’s my primary dev workstation at home, and also my gaming machine (which runs sunshine for streaming games). I also have a Mac VM set up with OSX-KVM and minimal resources for Bluebubbles.

My drives are set up in several pools. I have two SSD pools: a boot pool running ZFS for the host server system (Debian), and a VM/Container ZFS pool for docker container images and configs as well as the Mac VM. I also have a whole NVMe SSD dedicated to the workstation VM. Finally, I have two large HDD pools: A mergerfs/snapraid setup for media storage (4 drives) and a large ZFS pool (5 drives) for important personal data like pictures and documents.

Services I run:

• Ente
• Jellyfin
• Navidrome
• Kavita
• Bluebubbles
• HomeAssistant
• MollySocket
• Searxng
• Piped
• Cockpit
• Samba
• Prometheus/grafana
• qBitTorrent
• Homarr

Always looking for new self hosted stuff to try! I’m thinking of getting into the *arr stuff soon but I’m a bit intimidated by it. Also I’ve got a Raspberry Pi 5 on the way that I’m gonna use for Jellyfin, moonlight, and music streaming to my living room TV

FOSS for everything on my laptop and server, except discord and Spotify, but I’m migrating away as much as possible. I have a Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS and use mostly FOSS there too, but have Google play installed to the sandbox for some social media apps. Not perfect but pretty good and improving

They do. However the browser isn’t even gonna have an alpha release until 2026

It also compiles packages with newer architecture feature support than mainline arch. All of its packages are compiled for x86_64-v3 and x86_64-v4, as compared to the x86_64-v2 of standard arch. This improves performance at the cost of older CPU support