• 10 Posts
  • 253 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 10th, 2023

help-circle







  • You’re probably going to end up on Jitsi meet, but I’m also going to drop a recommendation for bigbluebutton.

    I recently noticed that it was integrated into the open source Learning-Management-System Canvas, which every school I have gone to so far uses.

    Although bigbluebutton doesn’t seem to explicitly support e2ee (but maybe this counts for something), if you are already using Canvas, BigBlueButton definitely worth looking at.

    I really, really wish people at my school would use the integrated bigbluebutton instead of using zoom, especially given I’ve seen people occasionally have issues with authentication for zoom, but all of that stuff is handled with bigbluebutton because it’s fully browser based and integrated into Canvas.








  • Maybe not some obscure ones, but here are some lesser known ones:

    Talos Linux. It’s an immutable operating system designed specifically to deploy kubernetes.

    OpenSuse Harvester Think Proxmox, but instead of VM’s and LXC containers, it’s VM’s and Kubernetes.

    XCP-NG is a RHEL based distro designed for managing Linux virtual machines using the xen hypervisor, as opposed to KVM. Think Proxmox, but RHEL and Xen (also no LXC). However, it does not come with a web ui out of the box, you have to deploy it yourself. Technically, XCP is a Xen distribution, since Xen is a kernel with nothing but a hypervisor that runs under the main distro, but the primary management virtual machine is RHEL based, and uses Linux.

    Speaking of Proxmox, Proxmox is technically a Linux distro.

    SnowflakeOS is a project that aims to bring a GUI focused experience to NixOS.

    TurnkeyLinux (site is loading very, very slowly for me right now) is not a single distribution, but rather a set of debian based distributions that are designed to be turnkey appliance virtual machines that contain and host a specific app. To deploy the app, all you have to do is set up the virtual machine.

    Now, here are some not-linux, but interesting distros:

    SmartOS. They ported KVM to unix, and also can use Linux syscall translation (similar to wine) to run apps in containers as well. There is also Bhyve. It’s a very interesting hypervisor platform.

    OmniOS is similar. Bhyve, KVM, and Linux syscall translation in containers.



  • Some software is so complex and difficult that Debian does not maintain it on their own, and instead follows the upstream release cycle.

    Browsers are one such example, and as you’ve discovered for me, Thunderbird is probably another.

    Also, please do not recommend testing for daily usage. It does not receive critical security updates in a timely manner, including for things that would effect desktop users. Use stable, Sid, or another distro. Testing is for testing Debian ONLY, and by using Debian Testing, you are losing the advantage of immediate security fixes that come from literally any other distro.





  • Wish I could transcend into declarativity but the thread’s nix survivor ratio is grim

    Yeah lol.

    I will say, that for my server, I decided to use kubernetes + fluxcd for declaratively. My entire kubernetes “state” is declared in a git repo, and this is the popular, industry standard for things like this, called GitOps. It makes it very easy to add an app, since it’s just adding a folder + some new config files. And unlike Nix, Kubernetes and Flux are very well documented with much tooling as well. Nix doesn’t really have a working LSP or good code autocomplete, but with kubernetes, I can just start typing in a yaml file and then hit tab and it spits out the template for me. Code autocompletion with kubernetes feels much more similar to the tooling of other, more mature tooling

    It’s not as declarative as nix though. There are things missing, like OCI containers could theoretically shift if you don’t rely on hashes and some other nitpicks. But declarativity is a spectrum, and I feel like, outside of scientific scenarios (think simulations where versioning, hardware, runtime etc being the same is very important), I think many non-nixos solutions are declarative enough.


  • Advice online seemed like i needed to basically create a nix flake for the app. I still havent gotten it installed because i have no idea what nix flakes are.

    So, the problem is that flakes are technically an “experimental” feature, and thus are not allowed to be included as a primary solution in the official documentation. But, basically everybody uses flakes, so it leads to this crazy documentation split, and is a big part of why documentation on Nix is so bad.

    Some stuff can only be done with flakes, some stuff only with non-flakes and you have to figure out which is which on your own, while also dealing with the poor documentation for either.

    The advice you received was wrong. You could also use a combination of a default.nix file and a shell.nix file to create a package and development environment for your app. But, the documentation is so poor that it’s unlikely you will learn this, and figuring out how to do this on your own, is again, a massive time sink.


  • So, I use Arch, but I don’t use the AUR at all. Instead, I use nixpkgs to get stuff (admittedly only like 3 packages) not in the Arch repos.

    The main reason for this is the quality of AUR packages. Although I don’t really fear a malicious package, I do remember hearing about a package that moved a users /bin to /opt during the install phase.

    Something like that is literally impossible with Nix, due to the way that applications aren’t really installed to the system. But, nixpkgs also requires some level of vetting the package quality, which is also nice.

    I also use nix for managing all my development environments. For example, my blog github repo, has a few nix files at it’s root, and you should just be able to type nix-shell in folder, and then you will get an identical environment to me.

    declarative rollbackable immutability sounds really freakin’ AWESOME

    I have BTRFS snapshots set up, and with grub-btrfs, I can even boot from them and revert to an older kernel (my /boot is stored on BTRFS).

    However, I have given up on NixOS, for many reasons. The documentation is very poor, and it’s more complexity than it’s worth, to make my whole OS reproducible, rather than just my development environments. In addition to that, their are also issues with running certain apps that expect to see a normal FIlesystem Hierarchy, which nix does not provide. Although you can work around this with stuff like steam-run or creating a fake FHS using nix, I would rather not play that game.

    But, considering I installed some stuff in an Ubuntu 22 distrobox recently, because that was what VScode and Unity official provide repos for, maybe this doesn’t really matter. You can probably use distrobox on Nixos, but I’ve seen issues about GPU acceleration with distrobox (and other non-nix apps) as well.

    EDIT: I lied, I use the chaotic aur for some things.