featured

I like using pics of skylines or city streets in socialist countries. Like beautiful little side streets in Cuba or a glowing view of Shanghai at night

This is real, not entirely common but becoming so as climate change accelerates. This image in particular is from the mountain town of Asheville, NC and is the result of Hurricane Helene.

States like Florida get hurricanes like this with some regularity and thus have built infrastructure to withstand it. It’s also a very flat state so geographically the flooding can run-off quickly. We here in the Appalachian mountains do not usually get hurricanes but apparently we do now. Thus the immense destruction as water pools in the valleys, rivers break over the banks, and infrastructure falls apart due to the flooding it was never designed for. Whole towns have been flooded out and washed away, people and all.

So is Arce just making this up? This article gives scant details

Well there are compatibility layers but they aren’t perfect. I’ve tried nix-ld, nix-alien, and nix-autobahn and each does work but not necessarily in all cases. I found this to be most common with scripts.

For example, I tried to install the discord mod Vencord using these solutions, but even with the compatibility shell I could not get past the first prompt.

Another issue I had was network authentication. An organization I’m in has a secure network requiring a web portal to sign in, and it uses a python script to get hardware details and install a certificate. This does not work even with FHS compatibility layers. I manually installed all of the python packages it wanted, which got it to launch and immediately crash. On traditional distros, it just works

I’m rambling but yes these tools exist and they may make everything rosy for you, but be aware of their own limitations because they didn’t solve much for me

I wanted to love nixos but it has many shortcomings that aren’t immediately obvious but can really stump you. No FHS compatibility seems fine but certain programs require it and don’t have nix native workarounds. Additionally, the documentation is really not good. I used it for a while but it got in the way too much; now I use a fedora variant and use regular Nix for dev packages using nix-direnv. Gives me the nix features while also having a fully compliant and functional base system

This is accurate. Additionally, the WebKit rendering engine that they have to use is open source, so not too bad imo

There’s a nuke unaccounted for that fell in Goldsboro, NC too. Could’ve broken apart but it could also just be buried out there somewhere

I think you’re better off finding tools which work for your particular language, application, workflow etc. For me I use nix and direnv to create directory based declarative package sets that load upon cd’ing to a project’s folder. This allows me to have exact versions of the packages I need regardless of system packaging or versions used in other projects. Some people prefer spinning up containers for this role, often using tools like distrobox. If the language you’re working in has good version management tooling then you can also just use that

Mozilla.social no longer exists, Mozilla took it down

Yeah, it needs proton or wine to run but it works flawlessly

It really is, it’s a lovely town and my heart aches for them

NHC seems to think that it’s possible but not guaranteed. Hoping beyond hope that it doesn’t form up. We’re going through enough here in the south