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People use computers to accplish tasks. That requires running software on an OS, but nobody runs software or an OS just to sit & watch it exist. They run it to accomplish tasks.
Different distros mostly vary in how easy it is to accomplish various tasks. No one distro is the easiest for everything, so people make different choices depending on their needs.
Budgerigars (small parrots).
They’re active, smart, and social. They fly.
So I made them a flight cage that takes up most of the room they’re in. I’d prefer a full walk-in aviary, but don’t have room in my apartment.
Cleaning isn’t bad, I just shop-vac out the litter tray & refill it with a 20lb bag of corn cob bits. Fresh food in the mornings, take it out & replace with pellets around noon. Clean water daily. Millet treats when I let them out (about an hour per day to interact with them).
Feathers get everywhere when they molt. And feather dust. Their room has its own HEPA filter.
Vet appointments are more expensive for exotics than cats & dogs. There are fewer exotic vets, and I always go to a board certified avian vet. Boarding when I go on vacation is also more expensive (about $50/day), especially since they’re flighted.
They’re not anywhere near as loud or destructive as larger parrots, but that doesn’t mean they’re quiet. Just means they might not damage your hearing from the next room. They wake up with the dawn, and let you know about it.
They’re extremely sensitive to airborne toxins (avian respiration is rather different from mammalian). That means absolutely no teflon cookware use, no air fresheners, etc.
I use NixOS & Home Manager. My config is in git, and I use an ephemeral setup with ZFS & tmpfs:
Mount layout:
/ tmpfs
├─/boot /dev/sda1 FAT32 EFI system partition
├─/nix rpool/local/nix ZFS partition
├─/home/persist rpool/safe/home ZFS partition
└─/persist rpool/safe/persist ZFS partition
ZFS partitions under rpool/safe/ get backed up, the rest don’t need to be. Everything else can be rebuilt (and most of it gets re-created at boot anyway, since / and /home are tmpfs).
I use wireless headphones. However, I like to have non-distracting background music at work (open-plan office), and I won’t put my personal files (music) on a company-owned laptop. So I run a wire from my phone’s headphone jack to the laptop line-in, and can thus play music without any mixing of data.
This poem by Jef Raskin includes several dozen exceptions:
“I before E
Except after C,
Unless pronounced A
As in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh’”
Education is forfeit for reinforcing such rules!
Sound a feisty reveille while eyeing the schools!
Neither will our heirs be agreeing to deceptions
Once seeing, herein, these sufficient exceptions:
We were seized by a feeling
For fleeing on the ceiling
To a leisurely meal
With Keith, Sheila, and Neil
We drank madeira, so foreign, in steins
Along with a surfeit of weird blueish wines
Being foolish, took codeine, ate ancient proteins
Therein guaranteeing these ogreish scenes
Wherein we’re canoeing to a new sovereign state
While deicing a kaleidoscope on a hot jadeite plate
And kneeing obeisance to an overseeing king
Our plebeian lips kissed his counterfeit ring.
Then we unveiled their sleight-of-hand trick
Deifying a heifer, with effect atheistic
And falling from the heights with a loud seismic crunch
We reignited the nonpareils we had heisted for lunch.
So I before E
Except after C
Unless pronounced A?
False decreeing, I say!
Baud rate is the maximum number of transitions per second of the state of a transmission medium. Hz is the actual number of cycles per second, so it varies degending on the data transmitted. Bitrate is the number of bits transmitted per second.
Usually bits are transmitted in groups with some redundancy to allow errors to be corrected. E.g. early Ethernet used 8b/10b encoding; 8 bits of data were transmitted as a 10 bit “symbol”.
With a 1b/1b encoding baud rate would equal bit rate, but in practice that was essentially never used so the numbers woud diverge. Bitrate is more meaningful to the user.
SI and binary prefixes can be applied to baud, so kilobaud is certainly a word.
Same, except ZFS instead of BTRFS for me.
And / is tmpfs, /home is tmpfs, /nix, /etc/nixos, /var/log, /home/$username/downloads, /home/$username/documents, and some other directories are ZFS subvolumes bind-mounted at boot. That’s only an option for NixOS or Guix though, so don’t worry about opt-in state on other distros.
Old-school forums have single points of contact. They’re no more private than ActivityPub, but a takedown to the admin is a takedown of all instances. Obviously public data can be cached or archived, so as always you have to send takedowns to every archival service, search engine, and any CDNs too.
The GDPR “applies” whenever an EU resident’s data is stored. The enforcement requires some presence in the EU by the entity storing the data. For multinational companies that means if they have any banking services there (e.g. taking payments from EU customers) they have a presence. For individual fediverse admins, that’s not necessarily a concern. At worst their instance’s domain would get blacklisted to EU users.
1: Anything that’s federated is public (to instance admins) and can’t be reliably deleted.
For ActivityPub, that’s pretty much everything except user account.
For email (SMTP) that’s sender, recipient, subject, and usually body.
Etc. Instance admins can log whatever they want. Laws like the GDPR or CCPA don’t apply to all instances.
2: User signup is much harder because choice paralysis over which instance to join often sets in. That in turn leads to default recommendations, resulting in centralization in a few instances. E.g. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml for lemmy, Gmail, Apple mail, MS Live email, AWS email options for email.
Daily use isn’t difficult IME. NixOS is just so nice once it’s working. It’s ridiculously easy to understand your system & how it’s set up (it’s all in your config). Nothing changes between updates that you don’t know about. You never have to merge configurations from upstream. It’s trivial to try something new without changing your system overall. Rollbacks are amazing. It’s easy to configure a new machine, to keep multiple machines synchronized (same packages & versions & even users & dotfiles). I have automatic updates enabled so I get a new system when I reboot, and if I don’t like an update I can just revert seamlessly. It basically works like an appliance: I don’t have to think about the way it’s set up unless I disagree with the defaults, and in that case I can change them. You can always override things, even down to applying patches to source code (though obviously that then requires re-compiling). It’s like if you took the stability of Debian, the up-to-date nature and huge repo of Arch & the AUR, and the configurability of Gentoo and mashed them all together.
The hard bits are packaging new programs and making “modules”. You can pretty much always configure a program by just writing the config file options in a Nix string block, e.g. I’ve got the following in my home-manager config for my ~/.xkbrc:
home.file.".config/kxkbrc" = {
text = ''
[$Version]
update_info=kxkb_variants.upd:split-variants
[Layout]
DisplayNames=
LayoutList=us
LayoutLoopCount=-1
Model=pc86
Options=terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,compose:rctrl
ResetOldOptions=true
SwitchMode=Global
Use=true
VariantList=colemak
'';
};
Modules would let that be a Nix expression, e.g. looking like
programs.xkeyboard = {
layout = "us";
variant = "colemak";
model = "pc86";
options = {
terminate = "ctrl_alt_bksp";
compose = "rctrl";
};
resetOldOptions = true;
};
but that requires writing an expression in Nix that converts the Nix syntax into whatever syntax the config file needs to be. That means learning a lot more Nix. Packaging programs also requires learning more Nix, and particularly how Nixpkgs builders work.
That said, the documentation is shitty, the error messages are shitty, Flakes are massively easier to work with but still “experimental” and lots of the docs & examples online are for pre-flakes, while nixpkgs is enormous it doesn’t have everything, and IDE support for Nix shell environments is lacking (have to use VS Code or a terminal-based editor like nvim).
Nix is sort of like democracy. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Nix is the worst way to manage an OS, except for all the others. It’s shitty, but it’s shitty in different ways and those mostly end up making day-to-day operations easier.
Used it for the last few years. X just doesn’t work right with multiple monitors of different resolution.