Not being able to Syu every 5 minutes and only being able to update once a day was the biggest challenge when I changed to NixOS

Interesting how similar our distro careers are. My switch was also after a long time (15 years). Wouldn’t go back to Arch. Still think it’s a good distro for what it’s trying to achieve.

Hey, I never said this is what people want, just that it is in fact a transferrable skill. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone just trying to get their machine running, but if you’re looking to gain some insight, is not the worst choice.

If you actually try to understand what’s happening, I think it’s one of the best ways to learn how a system is composed, at least if you install manually. What’s a partition, file system, what does mounting do, chroots, you name it.

I don’t use Arch anymore but still think it’s a great distro to learn the basics while still having the luxury of new binary packages. Manual Arch install abstracts basically nothing away from you, for better or for worse.

Currently on NixOS, I’d say while its engineering is better overall, the things you learn there are much more distribution-specific or maybe concept-specific and often not applicable to other distributions.

I guess there are also probably ways to install e.g. Debian manually, I’ve never seen instructions for it though as there was always the focus on the installer, and frankly I’m not a big fan of apt and all. It always seemed to be much more convoluted than pacman plus it does a lot of stuff for you, whether you want it or not was my impression.

The folders actually do make sense.

Roaming: this data can be moved between machines in a domain if you have a roaming profile. E.g. go to another workstation and your browser configuration is the same? Means it’s in Roaming.

Local: this data will not be synchronized between machines when you roam. This could be your browser’s cache.

LocalLow: like local, but for applications that are “low integrity”, like Internet Explorer. These folders have special properties. https://helgeklein.com/blog/internet-explorer-in-protected-mode-how-the-low-integrity-environment-gets-created/

Ah, to be 13 again.

I’d personally advise against NixOS as a first distribution for that matter. It’s a great distribution, but if you want to understand the underlying mechanics, start with something where you interact with them, like Arch or whatever.

Definitely not

The fact that I can’t seem to find traces of this game online makes me think that maybe my memory is wrong? But also hard to find information from back when the internet wasn’t flooded with stuff

Unreal Tournament 2k4 on one of the earlier Ubuntus, back when ShipIt was still a thing. Most have been around 2005 or 2006, as I used it in my mom’s flat which I moved out of in 2006.

I also played some games on an old version of Suse Linux back in 2001 or so? Maybe earlier? There was this game where you had to manage public transport in a city. Looked for that game recently but nothing came up. Also Kartoffelknülch back then. I tried to get some distributions running (like Mandrake) but only Suse somewhat worked. Being 14 and English not being your mother tongue doesn’t help with documentation when nobody in your family knows stuff about computers.

The arch wiki lists some methods to permanently name network interfaces at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Network_configuration#Change_interface_name

How is that happening? The number on the bus shouldn’t change from adding or removing drives. I could imagine this with disabling a card in UEFI / BIOS if that basically stops reporting the bus entry completely. But drives?

Anyhow, if I’m not mistaken, you can assign a fixed name based on the reported MAC.

It’s a good question what I really want. I’m very satisfied with my current system (NixOS) but in the end it’s still Linux and stuff like the 9P filesystem just intrigues me. So it’s not like I’d need to switch or anything. But a playground to apply the concepts to some problems would be nice. Maybe I’ll try 9front some day and see what I can do with it

I always want to try Plan 9 or one of its successors but actually never do. So many interesting concepts but nothing really to apply them to.

It was if you pretend anything before service pack 1 didn’t happen, I saw so many infected machines back then it wasn’t even funny. And I guess the more professional users saw it as a downgrade from Windows 2000.

it wouldn’t be the first time a Windows version bombs so bad in favor of its predecessor that they have to roll things back immediately, so we have a pretty clear picture of what that would look like.

The question is, would they care? End user business is a rather small position on their balance sheet I’d guess, it’s rather big support contracts and Azure. Let the individual users complain for a while, they’ve eaten all the shit over the years anyways, they’ll swallow another turd. My current employer justified switching from a Linux based system to Windows which took huge efforts with huge amounts of copium (“they’ve given in and understood our demands!”) yet I bet more issues will arrive when Windows 10 support expires.

Businesses won’t switch anyways, they never did in huge numbers, and private users are good at complaining and sometimes even holding out on old versions but once storage gets encrypted by ransomware that got in through unpatched security flaws in their no longer supported version of Windows, they’ll pay up anyways.

But I guess MS just says this idea out loud now so that people can get enraged and then they’ll do something less shitty and everyone will be like “we won! There’s no subscription!”

Enshittification referred to products and services that were previously good

🏅

Sure, but what is the point of the thread then? Of course a program will need the libraries it was linked against. The kernel has nothing to do with that really. The point was it is possible to run old binaries. Even a recent program will fail to run if its dependencies aren’t provided, that’s not an issue with older ones exclusively…

I ran UT2k4 in 2016 or so, it was dynamically linked but brought its libraries, I had to replace some IIRC but afterwards, it ran.