Yyyyyyupp

“Oh no, this device is rooted! :(” Yes because I know what I am doing, now show me my account balance you stupid piece of ahit banking app.

Ah, my bad then! I didn’t see a repo linked in the post or on the site. That’s great, then!

Cool idea. But since it doesn’t seem to be open source and self-hostable, I won’t trust it.

On many trackers, you get “paid” for time seeded. Usually in the forms of bonus points or the like. You can then exchange these for improving your ratio (or a freeleech token, or an invite,…).

It’s a system that also rewards keeping media available even if you are not uploading to anyone.

Also, keep in mind that often, a large part of the available content is freeleech (meaning leeching it doesn’t affect your ratio), but seeding those torrents usually still does improve your ratio.

Managing 30+ machines with NixOS in a single unified config, currently sitting at a total of around 17k lines of nix code.

In other words, I have put a lot of time into this. It was a very steep learning curve, but it’s paid for itself multiple times over by now.

For “newcomers”, my observations can be boiled down to this: if you only manage one machine, it’s not worth it. Maaaaaybe give home-manager a try and see if you like it.

Situation is probably different with things like Silverblue (IMO throwing those kinds of distros in with Guix and NixOS is a bit misleading - very different philosophy and user experience), but I can only talk about Nix here.

With Nix, the real benefit comes once you handle multiple machines. Identical or similar configurations get combined or parametrized. Config values set for Host A can be reused and decisions be made automatically based on it in Host B, for example:

• all hosts know my SSH pub keys from first boot, without ever having to configure anything in any of them
• my NAS IP is set once, all hosts requiring NAS access just reuse it implicitly
• creating new proxmox VMs just means adding, on average, 10 lines of nix config (saying: your ID will be this, you will run that service) and a single command, because the heavy lifting and configuring has already been done, once -…

Are we talking permanent background tracking? Or sending a message “hey, I’m here”?

I’m too lazy to insert the “look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power” meme here, so… Please imagine it instead.

I’m switching jobs in a couple of months, and I am SO glad to be leaving a (very well maintained!!) python codebase with type hints and mypy for a rust codebase.

It is just not the same.

At this point, package management is the main differentiating factor between distro (families). Personally, I’m vehemently opposed to erasing those differences.

The “just use flatpak!” crowd is kind of correct when we’re talking solely about Linux newcomers, but if you are at all comfortable with light troubleshooting if/when something breaks, each package manager has something unique und useful to offer. Pacman and the AUR a a good example, but personally, you can wring nixpkgs Fron my cold dead hands.

And so you will never get people to agree on one “standard” way of packaging, because doing your own thing is kind of the spirit of open source software.

But even more importantly, this should not matter to developers. It’s not really their job to package the software, for reasons including that it’s just not reasonable to expect them to cater to all package managers. Let distro maintainers take care of that.

I have been listening to SO many audiobooks since getting Audiobookshelve ❤️