Knowing my YouTube feed it's most probable that I end up in one of those DIY videos where they tell me how everyone can make thing easily at home and then proceed to use their thousands of dollars worth of professional workshop machinery to show me how to make thing.
I keep my arc welder next to my water jet cutter. Check out my next video where I build a fusion reactor. The follow up shows you the quantum computer I used to model the plasma.
Can you imagine taking someone from MacOS and giving them NixOS?
user: Great, June 2026, Upgrade time! What do I click on?
NixFriend: Umm, sorry you're going to need to open your terminal and change your nix-channels to https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-26.06 and you're going to need to do it under sudo.
user: umm, ok, now i'm upgraded?
NixFriend: no, not quite, you need nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
user: ohh jeeze, ok. umm, i got an error, a couple hundred lines it's kind of vague about a bunch of functions failing
NixFriend: Go back up 70-80 lines and see if it calls out a certain package being a problem, just ignore all the messages about variables not being set.
user: ohh wow, yeah, ok, something about pinentry and specifying ncurses and some messages about name deprecation
NixFriend: ohh yeah ok, that's pretty easy, go edit these text files, change all the names if mentions and either remove pinentry or just make or leave in pinentry-ncurses
user: Ohh ok; Now it's complaing that /boot is full
I only needed to screw with mesa, pinentry, vim-full, and unpin my kernel for v4l which is now fixed in OBS
I'm preparing to break out my configurations so that all my machines can share parts of them and maybe see if I can get my home .confgs a little more managed under home manager.
Wow, thank you for this comment! I was pondering maybe setting up a trial for NixOS at work, but now I see we just don't have the manpower to handle that.
This is real sad news. I was hoping it would allow for a "Intune-like" experience for people, where they'd just download the configs dynamically as needed.
Pretty well. I did have to create an "old-nixpkgs" variable for some of my packages (deadbeef is currently broken in 25.11 and warsow was removed). Rebuilt my configs on my work laptop, gaming desktop, and 1 of my servers without a hitch. Will wait on my DB server until my next offsite backup just in case...
I absolutely adore doing shell.nix environments and flakes. I basically don't have anything installed that I don't need on a daily basis. I use syncthing to keep a folder full of shell environments backed up.
cd /nixShells/video
nix-shell
BOOM, I have yt-dlp, ffmpeg-full, mpv, timg, kdenlive, python 3.12 with a bunch of subrip and AI subtitle generators.
I do what is needed and exit and it's all gone.
I keep one for wine, one for mp3, one for parsec, one for video
Don't worry. I tried it for about 2 years and didn't quite get the hang of it. Back on Arch now. NixOS really has a steep learning curve and not nearly enough documentation.
If you want to explore other immutable and declarative OSes – as well –, you could take Guix for a spin, too (and you can install things such as proprietary software with the NonGuix software repository, in case that's a concern any).
Not loving canonical, I hate snap with a passion, systemd.... Meh, mixed bag
But in general, I'm very happy with Kubuntu, it's been my main os forost of the 25+ years that I've used a Linux desktop. It's very easy to use and has mostly been very reliable, especially the server variant. KDE desktop always has been awesome
For a normal person? I'd argue there's about zero benefit to running BSD over some Linux distro. Less people use jails compared to containers, networking doesn't matter like you said, and hardware support is far more awful in terms of drivers. There's a reason there's like 2-3 desktop oriented distros on BSD compared to hundreds on Linux.
Security and difference of design philosophy. I run OpenBSD on one of my machines and I enjoy it. It has better software availability than I expected and it feels like a neater, more minimal system than Linuxes. Definitely falls into the "hobbyist computing" category rather than something I'd recommend for a practical use case, but it's fun.
The documentation is really good, hell they even go over assembly programming. And overall manpages for C functions I like more.
Also good for minimalist setups. Can have a graphical sway environment using vim with autocomplete and a browsing wikipedia while top shows 145Mb active ram.
Cluster computing. DragonflyBSD is structured entirely with a multiprocessing design philosophy, gives amazing cache coherency in Beowulf clusters thanks to the way the scheduler works.
Bit of a niche use case, but if you're doing gpu-unfriendly parallel compute operations like bidirectional path tracing or finite element analysis it really shines.
I've never heard of mangowc, and I'm scared of falling down another rabbit hole after cycling through so many window managers just to end up with sway again. I will not relapse.
If you stay on X, you can keep using the same window manager for longer. My XMonad config is over a decade old, and I bet my old dwm config.h still compiles.
Like Hyprland AND want to try Niri at the same time? BOOM MangoWC. Been using it for months now. Don't ever see myself going back to Hyprland. Completely bypassed the Niri hype too. It has tiling and scrolling modes. You can toggle between them. Just as smooth as Hyprland without all the bloat. Plus whenever someone says something about some window manger or DE you can now respond, 'no thank you, I'll have the Mango.'
Counterintuitively, something stops being magic the moment there is a guide for it.
For example, I am a wizard because I installed linux on an old inspiron tower with no display output during boot menu, relying entirely on instinct and mysticism to navigate the nonexistent menu with precise timing.
It’s all subjective and based on your personal level of interest. From a technical standpoint the time needed is based on how fast your computer can compile everything, how fast you read and understand the instructions, and how much effort you want to put into it.
I would be doing it to learn as well. I'm pretty good with Linux, I work for Red Hat. But, I don't get down in the weeds at all. I do mostly Ansible and OpenShift.
Reminds me of the time I ran a FreeBSD webserver from home, compiling Apache from source took the better part of a day. But still good times, learned a lot from that experience.
81 Comments
mech@feddit.org · 141 pts · 226d
Next: Stop using computers
invictvs@lemmy.world · 52 pts · 226d
"How to build a difference engine at home (2026 edition) "
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de · 11 pts · 226d
Now you've ended up in the Lego builds part of YouTube.
invictvs@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 226d
Knowing my YouTube feed it's most probable that I end up in one of those DIY videos where they tell me how everyone can make thing easily at home and then proceed to use their thousands of dollars worth of professional workshop machinery to show me how to make thing.
NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de · 6 pts · 226d
You mean to tell me you don't have a CNC machine at home? Even the most barebones of homes must have arc welding gear stashed somewhere, right?
LeFantome@programming.dev · 3 pts · 226d
I keep my arc welder next to my water jet cutter. Check out my next video where I build a fusion reactor. The follow up shows you the quantum computer I used to model the plasma.
ogeist@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 226d
Stop... Just Stop...
aaaaaaaaargh@feddit.org · 101 pts · 226d
How about stop using computers in general
craftrabbit@lemmy.zip · 52 pts · 226d
Stop using CPUs
Here's how to configure an FPGA for your workflow
rovingnothing29@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 226d
So the 'new' commodores?
LeFantome@programming.dev · 4 pts · 226d
Why the quotes? Is the Commodore 64 Ultimate ‘old’?
rovingnothing29@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 226d
No, I just can't think of a C64 as new.
bbboi@feddit.uk · -1 pts · 224d
Increase in efficiently ++
FalschgeldFurkan@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 226d
"Stop using computers! Learn here how to go outside"
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 12 pts · 226d
Have you looked outside? Don't wanna.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 226d
STOP USING EYES
Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 225d
Abacus is tactile.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 225d
I see where this is going. Let me get ahead of you
cypherpunks@lemmy.ml · 12 pts · 226d
underscores@lemmy.zip · 74 pts · 226d
unironically this shit is so prevalent in the programming community that I can't help to laugh and shrug it off
remember: YouTubers are just that, most of them don't even work with the tech they gloat about
and for devlopment tools/frameworks/dependencies the mantra is: boring tech works, just remember that it needs to be currently supported/developed
communism@lemmy.ml · 15 pts · 226d
I think it's just clickbait/being hyperbolic. I imagine the videos themselves are just normal tutorials or intros to the topic.
r8KNzcU8TzCroexsE2xbWC@lemmy.ca · 54 pts · 226d
I see it goes full circle, FreeBSD from MacOS (which has a lot of BSD code)
felixwhynot@lemmy.world · 20 pts · 226d
I was gonna say that’s a long walk to get back to a BSD based system lol
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 226d
But less MacOS.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 49 pts · 225d
Can you imagine taking someone from MacOS and giving them NixOS?
user: Great, June 2026, Upgrade time! What do I click on?
NixFriend: Umm, sorry you're going to need to open your terminal and change your nix-channels to https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-26.06 and you're going to need to do it under sudo.
user: umm, ok, now i'm upgraded?
NixFriend: no, not quite, you need nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade
user: ohh jeeze, ok. umm, i got an error, a couple hundred lines it's kind of vague about a bunch of functions failing
NixFriend: Go back up 70-80 lines and see if it calls out a certain package being a problem, just ignore all the messages about variables not being set.
user: ohh wow, yeah, ok, something about pinentry and specifying ncurses and some messages about name deprecation
NixFriend: ohh yeah ok, that's pretty easy, go edit these text files, change all the names if mentions and either remove pinentry or just make or leave in pinentry-ncurses
user: Ohh ok; Now it's complaing that /boot is full
xoggy@programming.dev · 12 pts · 225d
How'd your 25.11 channel migration go, fellow Nix-enjoyer?
rumba@lemmy.zip · 11 pts · 225d
Second-best ever. 25.05 was seamless.
I only needed to screw with mesa, pinentry, vim-full, and unpin my kernel for v4l which is now fixed in OBS
I'm preparing to break out my configurations so that all my machines can share parts of them and maybe see if I can get my home .confgs a little more managed under home manager.
How was yours?
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 225d
Wow, thank you for this comment! I was pondering maybe setting up a trial for NixOS at work, but now I see we just don't have the manpower to handle that.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 224d
Nope. I was thinking of doing an immutable server with it because that would be neat AF.
But the updates are deprecated way too soon. You really need to take the latest milestones really close to when they happen.
I run it myself at work for a couple of years now, but I wouldn't want to support the userland on it, even the technically competent ones.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 224d
This is real sad news. I was hoping it would allow for a "Intune-like" experience for people, where they'd just download the configs dynamically as needed.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 224d
give em time, given they're not young by any standard, but they are starting to gain traction which should help bring about advances.
xoggy@programming.dev · 2 pts · 223d
Pretty well. I did have to create an "old-nixpkgs" variable for some of my packages (deadbeef is currently broken in 25.11 and warsow was removed). Rebuilt my configs on my work laptop, gaming desktop, and 1 of my servers without a hitch. Will wait on my DB server until my next offsite backup just in case...
Fijxu@programming.dev · 8 pts · 225d
lol yeah Nix is definitely not for everyone, but an insane flexible tool when you know how to use it.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 225d
My favorite part is syncing one file and my home folder and moving from one computer to another seamlessly.
I've moved hardware three times and always been right back in service.
MuckyWaffles@leminal.space · 3 pts · 225d
I tried NixOS for a solid month, didn't click for me, so now I'm on gentoo. I'll have to try it again someday.
rumba@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 225d
I absolutely adore doing shell.nix environments and flakes. I basically don't have anything installed that I don't need on a daily basis. I use syncthing to keep a folder full of shell environments backed up.
cd /nixShells/video nix-shell
BOOM, I have yt-dlp, ffmpeg-full, mpv, timg, kdenlive, python 3.12 with a bunch of subrip and AI subtitle generators. I do what is needed and exit and it's all gone.
I keep one for wine, one for mp3, one for parsec, one for video
Then I have flakes for real development work.
admittedly, it's a lot :)
Chais@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 225d
Don't worry. I tried it for about 2 years and didn't quite get the hang of it. Back on Arch now. NixOS really has a steep learning curve and not nearly enough documentation.
tomenzgg@midwest.social · 2 pts · 225d
If you want to explore other immutable and declarative OSes – as well –, you could take Guix for a spin, too (and you can install things such as proprietary software with the NonGuix software repository, in case that's a concern any).
goatinspace@feddit.org · 42 pts · 226d
phoenixz@lemmy.ca · 17 pts · 226d
Not loving canonical, I hate snap with a passion, systemd.... Meh, mixed bag
But in general, I'm very happy with Kubuntu, it's been my main os forost of the 25+ years that I've used a Linux desktop. It's very easy to use and has mostly been very reliable, especially the server variant. KDE desktop always has been awesome
Captain_Faraday@programming.dev · 4 pts · 226d
LeFantome@programming.dev · 2 pts · 226d
Does Kubuntu not use snap?
goatinspace@feddit.org · 2 pts · 225d
Yes, it has snap
goatinspace@feddit.org · 1 pts · 225d
In Ubuntu stuck I see youself, hmm? Try to endeavour, you don't.
asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev · 42 pts · 226d
"2027 edition"
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk · 36 pts · 226d
Someone is doing a speedrun, I see.
umbrella@lemmy.ml · 22 pts · 226d
alecsargent@lemmy.zip · 19 pts · 226d
all their videos are like that, they seem pretty cool and they made their own window manager.
beegnyoshi@lemmy.zip · 15 pts · 226d
How is this the first time I hear about mangoWC?
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de · 20 pts · 226d
my WC smells more like lemon, I guess it just depends on what you clean it with
Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 15 pts · 226d
Serious question, what is the use case for bsd? It just seems like Linux but with far worse hardware and software support
varnia@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 24 pts · 226d
Secure devices for network, routing, firewall.
PF, OpenSSH, LibreSSL was developed by OpenBSD team.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 15 pts · 226d
I disagree with some approaches of Linux. Thinking of switching to a BSD.
That's the usecase.
Steamymoomilk@sh.itjust.works · 14 pts · 226d
Jails, bsd is really good at jails and networking
Scoopta@programming.dev · 7 pts · 226d
But Linux also has containers and I haven't found a networking setup I can't do with it so while this may be true it seems anecdotal
timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 226d
Really good network stack. Linux is catching up surely but places like Netflix run a ton of stuff on BSD simply for that stack. AFAIK ebpf is supposedly the thing that will have Linux compete in this space- https://dev.to/dpuig/understanding-ebpf-a-game-changer-for-linux-kernel-extensions-4m7i
For a normal person? I'd argue there's about zero benefit to running BSD over some Linux distro. Less people use jails compared to containers, networking doesn't matter like you said, and hardware support is far more awful in terms of drivers. There's a reason there's like 2-3 desktop oriented distros on BSD compared to hundreds on Linux.
The_Decryptor@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 226d
Depends on the specific BSD, OpenBSD for example is only just now catching up to Linux.
Edit: Slide 28 for a graph
timbuck2themoon@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 225d
Well sure. I mainly meant FreeBSD. Thanks for clarifying.
communism@lemmy.ml · 12 pts · 226d
Security and difference of design philosophy. I run OpenBSD on one of my machines and I enjoy it. It has better software availability than I expected and it feels like a neater, more minimal system than Linuxes. Definitely falls into the "hobbyist computing" category rather than something I'd recommend for a practical use case, but it's fun.
Twakyr@feddit.org · 5 pts · 226d
You can install it on a few megabites of ram, it has far better malware protection, due to its small userbase.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 225d
It's fun to try new stuff.
The documentation is really good, hell they even go over assembly programming. And overall manpages for C functions I like more.
Also good for minimalist setups. Can have a graphical sway environment using vim with autocomplete and a browsing wikipedia while top shows 145Mb active ram.
(Does use cache a lot more than linux tho)
Techlos@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 225d
Cluster computing. DragonflyBSD is structured entirely with a multiprocessing design philosophy, gives amazing cache coherency in Beowulf clusters thanks to the way the scheduler works.
Bit of a niche use case, but if you're doing gpu-unfriendly parallel compute operations like bidirectional path tracing or finite element analysis it really shines.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 226d
It's for when you're such a contrarian cunt that when you stopped using Mac over windows, you had to move to bsd over Linux.
hperrin@lemmy.ca · 14 pts · 226d
Every time you install Linux, Linus clips a penguin’s wings.
Think of the penguins. Stop using Linux.
xoggy@programming.dev · 2 pts · 223d
And careful with those unix systems. Every time someone compiles Minix, Andrew Tanenbaum shaves a raccoon's ass.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 225d
ah yes the TempleOS zealots are prostyltizing again
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social · 11 pts · 226d
when’s the “STOP USING MONOLITHICS” saga?
MuckyWaffles@leminal.space · 8 pts · 225d
I've never heard of mangowc, and I'm scared of falling down another rabbit hole after cycling through so many window managers just to end up with sway again. I will not relapse.
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 225d
If you stay on X, you can keep using the same window manager for longer. My XMonad config is over a decade old, and I bet my old dwm config.h still compiles.
JakoJakoJako13@piefed.social · 2 pts · 224d
Like Hyprland AND want to try Niri at the same time? BOOM MangoWC. Been using it for months now. Don't ever see myself going back to Hyprland. Completely bypassed the Niri hype too. It has tiling and scrolling modes. You can toggle between them. Just as smooth as Hyprland without all the bloat. Plus whenever someone says something about some window manger or DE you can now respond, 'no thank you, I'll have the Mango.'
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 225d
The next video is going to be called stop existing.
LostWanderer@fedia.io · 6 pts · 226d
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online · 18 pts · 226d
Counterintuitively, something stops being magic the moment there is a guide for it.
For example, I am a wizard because I installed linux on an old inspiron tower with no display output during boot menu, relying entirely on instinct and mysticism to navigate the nonexistent menu with precise timing.
Prove_your_argument@piefed.social · 19 pts · 226d
Does remembering my starcraft cd key count?
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online · 12 pts · 226d
It is granted, Acolyte.
LostWanderer@fedia.io · 1 pts · 226d
dohpaz42@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 226d
Or they’re bored. I’ve done Linux From Scratch before. It’s fun. It’ll teach you a lot about building and maintaining a distro.
Do it. Take a weekend, and indulge yourself.
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 226d
How long does it reasonably take? Just a weekend?
dohpaz42@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 226d
It’s all subjective and based on your personal level of interest. From a technical standpoint the time needed is based on how fast your computer can compile everything, how fast you read and understand the instructions, and how much effort you want to put into it.
So yeah, a weekend could be reasonable.
Alexstarfire@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 226d
One month, got it.
psud@aussie.zone · 2 pts · 225d
When I last set up LFS it took a week, but I read everything. I was doing it to better understand how Linuxes work
...that was a full week, it would have taken much longer had I had other things to do
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 225d
I would be doing it to learn as well. I'm pretty good with Linux, I work for Red Hat. But, I don't get down in the weeds at all. I do mostly Ansible and OpenShift.
ieGod@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 226d
I've got a host running FreeBSD, I use it for pfsense. It's probably my most reliable machine. Limited use case but would recommend.
Aganim@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 225d
Reminds me of the time I ran a FreeBSD webserver from home, compiling Apache from source took the better part of a day. But still good times, learned a lot from that experience.