Dolphin (well, whatever the KDE’s indexer is called) uses xattrs under the hood for tagging, so it will be compatible with other software (including {get,set}fattr).

The index has to be up-to-date, but then that would be true with any tag-based filesystem, it’s just happening on a different layer (and arguably a layer which is more suitable for this - not sure it’d be a good idea to enforce synchronous indexing during xattr writes).

The most significant user-facing obstacle is lack of software which supports this system, but I guess that shows that there’s not much desire for it in reality.

One that stops inviting ideological battles

That’s impossible IMHO. Nix is fundamentally about doing things “the right way”, and so there will always be disagreements about what “the right way” is. I think they are bound to be eventually settled on the best possible answer, you don’t need a fork for that.

The CSS thing might be true, but the swayconfig file is probably a solvable problem, especially with everything being slowly moving to freeform modules. We just need to write a Nix -> swayconfig generator, which shouldn’t be too difficult because swayconfig is not even turing-complete.

You don’t have to waste 30 seconds on a full eval when just iterating, I use these one-liners when trying to get some config file working: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/flake.nix#L140 ; they only evaluate one specific file and then link it into the right location “imperatively”

Then when I get it working I do the nixos-rebuild switch, which is a no-op in terms of home-manager stuff because the link points to the same location, it just makes it so that it stays the same after a reboot (I use impermanence).

I think what you’re looking for is simply an indexer + UI that sorts your filesystem by tags rather than by directory structure. Not sure if that’s as beneficial as you imagine it to be, but IIRC KDE allows you to do something like that in Dolphin.

They provide the same immutability guarantees

Not as easy to have your entire system introspectable, sharable between devices, and under the same VCS. NixOS is declarative first and foremost, and all other benefits fall out from that; immutability is just one of them.

NixOS is a hack that shoehorns existing FOSS software into what an OS should really be. I doubt we’ll get anything better for the foreseeable future, except maybe Guix.

They’re writing a new package manager/build system and bootloader. So I guess mostly NIH, which is totally fine by me.

Nah, honestly, I think stuffing an entire computer inside a monitor and relying on it to generate/show content is a bad idea no matter what software it runs. A dumb TV + a small computing dongle requires only a tiny fraction more labor to produce than a smart TV, but it’s so much easier to upgrade in the future if you decide you need faster boot times or wanna game on the TV, etc. And if the TV breaks before the dongle does, you can also buy a new TV and keep all your settings/media without transferring anything.

Ah, it’s not the best for cases like that, especially if you need to make different layouts all the time. You can get it to do anything with enough packages and positioning hints, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore. If you just need a dozen of layouts and then fill them out with different content, it’s doable.

I haven’t seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, L^AT_EX for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.

Abstraction, when used well, is actually a tool that produces more simple code in the long run. It separates different concerns into different pieces of code, makes code readable by extracting common logic and giving it a recognizable name, and reduces boilerplate.

That said, OOP-style inheritance-based abstractions, while useful in some cases, quite often lead people down the complete opposite path - mushing together unrelated logic and then making call sites difficult to understand with a lot of hidden state that has to be kept in mind.

So yeah, there’s no exact answer to “what happens to Linux after Torvalds”, it’s more of “who gets to add more maintainers to torvalds/linux.git if nobody merges things in there for 72 hours”. I suppose Linus is confident that the system of distributed maintainers is robust enough to survive his & gregkh’s incapacitation, and the only remaining point of failure is access to the central repo itself. I think he is underestimating the governance upheaval that would happen if he was to disappear, so I hope that he puts some more details about his views on future project governance in writing.

Only if the touchscreen also has a fluffy texture.

That’s true, for me the main issue with any automation under capitalism is that it brings yet more power to the corpos and the billionaires and takes away power from the labor.

In this particular case it also sucks because the end product of genAI is soulless slop, and video genAI is quite a power hog. I agree that it’s ok for assisting developers/writers/artists/video editors in boring repetitive tasks.

I think LLMs are neat and useful tools in some circumstances. So I don’t hate “AI”, I hate the billionaires who are pushing it down our throats, or trying to replace us.

Yes, the reasoning behind this is sad, but the outcome is very positive.

These particular news are based and a long-term good for the humanity. Moving from spying corpo slop to an open-source solution is a win-win for the french people. Sad that it is only happening now, this should have been done decades ago, the US empire and its corporations have always been evil. Now they are just showing their true face to europe and the US population.

It’s not just about the temperature, it’s also about how quickly the temperature is dropping. Usually when the temperature goes down, trees do some “clever” shit with the sap inside them, specifically so that there’s less moisture in them and when it freezes and expands the tree doesn’t crack. However if it drops too quickly the trees can’t do their magic quickly enough, too much water freezes, puts too much stress on the tree and it may crack.

BTW Guix+Hurd, a fully GNU OS, has been around for quite a while now: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/a-hello-world-virtual-machine-running-the-hurd. You can even run it on real hardware: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2024/hurd-on-thinkpad/

I technically have three names (given name, patronymic, family name). I’ve lived in a few countries, all with different name systems. I’ve found that this is the best easiest rule set to avoid trouble:

• If possible, use only the first and family name, those are very widely understood.
  • If possible, when making a passport in your country of origin, request that those are the only names recorded, and they are transliterated into latin according to some official (or at least widely recognized) ruleset.
• If possible, use the latin transliterations as written in the passport.
  • Otherwise, look up official transliteration rules from latin to local language and use those.
  • Don’t try transliterating by yourself, or transliterating from the original names, it will cause issues.
  • If some system somewhere transliterates your names otherwise, complain loudly before they get committed anywhere.
  • If the local system forces you to have a “common” first name and your name doesn’t fit, choose one that’s as close as possible to the rules described above. If there is no close alternative, choose the one you like, but be prepared for issues down the road.
• If possible, leave all other names as blank, otherwise as -.
  • Don’t try fitting a “middle name” from one system into another.
  • If possible, avoid fitting into the local system at all, e.g. don’t make up a second family name even if the system calls for it. In my case, I didn’t reuse the patronymic even when the local system had it as well, because my father’s name is obviously not a local name so it would look really weird.
  • If asked, say you don’t have any other names.

Of course, this is just what worked best in my specific situations, other countries may be different.

And also, I don’t care at all about my legal name (all my friends call me by another name anyways) so I’m fine dropping a part of it, the goal here is to just make interactions with governments, banks, etc as smooth and easy as possible.