pnictogen-wing

The Pnictogen Wing

@pnictogen-wing

  • they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)

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pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

"the Unix complaint"

is the universal condition of all nixlike OSes, in which the OS is intolerable to use out of the box, and cannot be made tolerable without dozens of hours of surgical troubleshooting

how do i make new terminals source .profile on launch, how do i get my apps into the cde launcher bar, how do i change my shell to something from the 20th century

each change you make is in a different file, and the files are strewn to the four winds. so if you need to reinstall or stand up another machine with the same behavior, you simply have to do it all again from first principles, because figuring out what you changed is impractical.

it's all trial and error - "maybe this'll work on your release, idk, do you have chsh" - so only the most organized person alive will have been able to keep complete running notes, and working out what you altered after the fact is harder than just doing the research again from the beginning

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

apexpredator
@apexpredator

imo nix easily solves the reproducible environments problem but pretty much nothing else crd mentioned, on top of requiring you to learn a bespoke configuration language (json if it was turing complete) and how to configure all of your favorite packages within that language. you're almost better off using, like... ansible gags

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apexpredator
@apexpredator

i've tried many distros, including nix most recently. like all distros, it required dozens of hours of surgical troubleshooting, as mentioned. the only difference is now i have a config i can use if i want to stand up another nix machine, which i almost definitely won't need to do

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MorningSong
@MorningSong

A very few linux variants have slowly been working on the problem of a sensible default, of shipping a sensible configuration to make everything work well, but I think that's a bandaid on the problem.

What's really needed, among many other things, is sensible fallbacks. What use is a nice out of the box config when something goes wrong and your "desktop" is a black and white dither with an "X" for a mouse cursor? When your nice command line becomes $ with no $PATH.

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ctrl-salt-del
@ctrl-salt-del

I genuinely feelntge opposite of this--since all of my config is in dotfiles spinning up a new desktop machine or server ends up being mostly copying over those files and referencing my notes (which are definitely /not/ those of the most organized person alive) for the few (text only!) invocations I need to make the other bits happen. By contrast Windows setups are long, painful, and touch-heavy, and when I'm done I usually still don't have something I'm happy with.

(i also fully disagree with "the OS is intolerable to use out of the box" so we may just be too far apart on this topic)

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