Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
In early June, demonstrations exploded after ICE carried out militarized raids in working-class communities and workplaces in Los Angeles, CA, leading to large confrontations between ICE, the LAPD,...
NEW: Sunrise Movement Executed Series of Senate Disruptions to Stop Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ 📹
In an attempt to stop Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill,' the Sunrise Movement executed several disruption actions outside the offices of senators who support the bill.
“In ‘The Unseen’, an anonymous young narrator describes the existential process of his militant radicalization, from the high school revolts and the first squatted social centers to the use of revolutionary violence amongst a broader armed struggle…
The militant practices of the late 1990s, from black blocs to social forums and occupations, would end up informing mass mobilizations, first in the anti-globalization movements of Seattle, Prague, and Genoa, and later in the Arab Spring(s), in the occupied plazas and anti-austerity movements of Southern Europe, where a protesting multitude adopted the critical and antagonist repertoire of the militant milieu.”
Federated Services are services which many instances form a network to provide a greater whole than the sum of their parts, each participant in the Fediverse is an “instance”. A message or other item made available on one instance is visible and available on other instances.
We make these services available to all people who do not abuse it in order to promote the values of Free Speech, and those of the United States Constitution First Amendment. A free republic is not possible without free speech and commercial mainstream media do not provide it. We also get some advertisement benefit from hosting these, it is our hope that people who see how fast and responsible our services are will decide to do hosting or use other paid services here.
There are numerous federated services available, we offer Macrobloging platform Friendica, Hubzilla; Microbloging services Mastodon, Misskey, a federated search engine, Yacy, and a federated cloud service, Nextcloud.
Macrobloging services are message systems that allow long form posts similar in format to Facebook. These allow for works of fiction, poetry, technical papers, news items, short stories, and more. These formats are most useful for discussion of social issues.
Microbloging services allow only short form posts similar in format to Twitter. While you can link to larger articles elsewhere, you have a relatively short character limit and so can not post them directly.
Censorship, is handled much different on the fediverse than on mainstream media like Twitter or Facebook. On the fediverse, each individual instance is responsible for content available on that instance, but does not censor the rest of the network. Thus if you find the rules of one instance too constraining you can move to another.
Federated search engines are analogous to federated message systems in that each instance chooses what portion of the internet it wants to crawl. When you enter a search term, the local instance queries all of the federated instances, collates and sorts the results and presents them to you. As with messages, each instance can have it’s own censorship policies but no one instance can censor the entire network.
Given the wild-west nature of the fediverse, it is probably not suitable for children under 14, and you’re guaranteed to find some material that will offend virtually everyone. With federated search engines, material that is inappropriate will usually be flagged sensitive or nsfw (not safe for work) so as long as you don’t expand material marked as such, you can avoid this sort of material. There are occasionally people who violate these rules, we do our best to remove such individuals none the less some will get through.
We offer the following federated services:
Friendica.Eskimo.Com Friendica is a decentralized long format macrobloging message network. It is similar in format to facebook however there is no centralized censorship. Also, it is able to federate with all other federated message systems which use ActivityPub protocol and also we have extensions that allow it to speak to several other networks via other protocols.
Hubzilla.Eskimo.Com Hubzilla is similar in message format to Friendica in that it allows long posts. However, it specializes in it’s ability to provide connectivity to multiple protocols and so we include it in our mix of federated services primarily for the better connectivity it offers. Hubzilla provides a great deal of interoperability between many networks though ActivityPub is still it’s primary protocol. Hubzilla gives you a greater degree of control over privacy than some of the other networks. You can create private channels that are served between hubzilla instances and other compatible instances.
Mastodon.Eskimo.Com Mastodon is first and foremost an alternative to Twitter. While Twitter has Tweets, Mastodon has Toots. The format is very similar. Mastodon toots have a limit of 500 characters. Similar to the short limit of Twitter. This is why this platform is referred to as a Microbloging format. Mastodon interacts with other ActivityPub instances however when a long form blog post from another instance arrives, you are only shown a short portion with a link to follow to see the full post on the originating site.
NextCloud.Eskimo.Com Nextcloud If you are a customer of Eskimo North, your login credentials will work without a domain extension to access Nextcloud. If you are not a customer you can apply for a Nextcloud account using your choice of login and password, in this case the login should include your originating network. Some features require an Eskimo North shell account to take full advantage of.
Pixelfed.Eskimo.Com Pixelfed is a federated pixel gallery. A place where you can share your photos to the widest audience possible, and you can view what others have shared. Instance is new as of April 6th, 2025.
Yacy.Eskimo.Com Yacy is a federated search engine. There are several thousand instances on the Internet. Each instances crawls whatever portion of the web the administrator requested. It is also possible for the administrator of a site with relatively few resources to request a larger site to do crawls on their behalf. Unfortunately, it does not provide a method for an end user to initiate a crawl, but if you send e-mail to support@eskimo.com and request a crawl, we will initiate a crawl on your behalf.
Shell Accounts A shell is a command line interface for an operating system. With most shell providers, a command line interface on one flavor of Linux or Unix is all you get. Eskimo North provides access to eight different popular Linux distributions and SunOS Unix. Eskimo North also full remote desktop capabilities using X2Go with sound, and also NX, VNC, and RPD without sound.
Account Types We offer four different levels of shell accounts: Economy, Standard, Power, and Enterprise. Background tasks such as IRC bots, Game Servers, and the like are permitted on all account types except student. IRC servers are not permitted because of their tendency to draw denial of service attacks. Standard, Power, Enterprise, and Super-Max shells include a MySQL database allowing you to run a variety of LAMP stack based applications on your website and to use non-web based applications that require a database.
Web Hosting Web hosting under our domain is provided with all shell accounts. You can host your own domains with virtual domains or web hosting packages.
Remote Desktop Remote desktop capability is like having a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers plugged right into our servers. Because our servers can be accessed anywhere in the world, this allows you to have a work environment you can access from anywhere in the world without risking losing your files to a laptop, tablet, or phone thief. We offer remote desktop capabilities on all of our shell servers except for the SunOS server. We support x2go, nx, vnc, and rdp protocols. X2go is the best choice as it provides extremely efficient compression and X round trip removal as well as sound.
Applications Applications include Office Suites such as Libre Office and Caligra (which can read and write Microsoft Office file formats), Web and Program Development tools such as Bluefish Editor as well as many other editors, compilers, interpreters, scripting languages, debuggers, profilers, and online documentation.
E-mail Our e-mail system offers unprecedented flexibility. You can access your mail via shell mail readers including graphical mailers like Thunderbird, or via Web mail, or via pop-3 and imap mail protocols, complete with TLS encryption. Our mail system includes Bayesian filtering with Spam Assassin which can be individually configured for your needs. Procmail allows you to sort and process mail automatically. Smartlist allows you to maintain mailing lists.
Security[color] Access to all of our servers is available via strong encryption. The shell servers all support ssh access. All of the remote desktop protocols tunnel via ssh. We maintain all of our servers up to date keep with the latest patches. Backups are made weekly.
[color=darkblue]Eskimo North has been providing Unix timeshare services since 1985. We have been providing Linux timeshare, shell access, web hosting, e-mail, and Internet services since 1992. Please take a look at our services as they support our free Federated services including Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Nextcloud, Pixelfed, and Yacy Search.
Available Shell Servers
We have a variety of Linux Servers with a variety of Linux Distributions and Desktop Environments. Linux servers in use here are of three basic lines, those derived from RedHat, such as Fedora, Centos, and Scientific Linux, and those derived from Debian such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint. Ubuntu is the most current and feature rich. Then there is Manjaro, derived from Arch Linux. Arch is more often broken because it is a real “do it yourself” Linux, an excellent learning platform, a good development platform, not a good production platform.
All of these servers are available if you have a shell account here. You can use them to learn various versions, decide which to install, and as one place you can develop applications for all versions. We install a wide variety of development tools on all of our publicly available servers.
Our servers listen to port 443 in addition to the standard ssh port of 22 to provide a means to connect from behind a firewall that blocks non-web access. You can also utilize Guacamole on our website (login public, password public).
Alma.Eskimo.Com This server is running Alma 8. Alma Linux replaces Scientific Linux after it’s discontinuation. Presently we are running Alma 8 because Alma 9 does not support NIS out of the box although there are ways of hacking it in. It is unfortunate that Redhat chose to piss on the infrastructure so many organizations depend upon. This is why we tend to favor Debian derived flavors. None the less as Redhat derived software goes Alma is pretty solid. Anduinos.Eskimo.Com Anduinos is a Debian derived distribution that defaults to a Gnome Desktop themed to look like Windows 10. At present though this Desktop is not working over network connections, instead Mate and Gnome are presently available. I am working on some others. Debian.Eskimo.Com Debian Bullseye has a rich assortment of software installed, including hundreds of Games, a huge variety of Office Productivity software, many Educational and Scientific applications, a variety of Integrated Development Environments, and many programming languages. All of the documentation available online these applications is also loaded. Fedora.Eskimo.Com Fedora Rawhide can be accessed graphically using x2go and the Mate desktop. It has the most applications of any of the Redhat derived servers. I install just about everything I can get to work on this machine so it has a huge variety of applications installed. Kali.Eskimo.Com Kali is a special purpose shell server designed for penetration testing. It is primarily here to test our own internal security, and as a result, egress is extremely limited, however upon request, proof of IP space ownership, and permission of the owner and agreement to hold us harmless because it is possible some of these tests may be destructive, we will allow outbound for testing of other sites. Manjaro.Eskimo.Com Manjaro is a good choice for a Linux user who wants to just install and go. There is a pleasant user interface and a good choice of software in the Manjaro repositories. It is a less technical Linux than Ubuntu, you can do most things through graphical interfaces and the default xfce interface is extremely light in terms of memory footprint. Like most modern distros, a variety of Windows systems are available and we have Gnome, Mate, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and LXQT installed. Mint.Eskimo.Com Mint is another recent addition to our shell servers. It is running Mint, although we have the Mate Desktop installed for graphical access. This is necessary because Unity and other compositing Desktops are incompatible with x2go and really work very roughly with VNC. If you like games, this is a good server to use and there are many installed. Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu which in turn is derived from Debian and this server thus follows the structure and layout of Debian and Ubuntu. MxLinux.Eskimo.Com MxLinux is an excellent choice for a computer with limited resources. Before the overhead of a Desktop is considered, MxLinux uses 200MB less RAM out of the box than does Ubuntu. If you’re not a fan of Poettering and Systemd, you’ll like this OS as it still uses a System-V init with Systemd shims to allow packages requiring systemd to function. You can also run systemd and in fact I am doing so because it boots faster. The default Desktop is LXDE which is also small and efficient. But if you like eye candy you can install any Desktop you like and as with other servers I will install all that I can get to work on this OS. PopOS.Eskimo.Com popOS is a modern appearing OS based upon Ubuntu, and not just indirectly, it actually utilizes Ubuntu’s repositories in addition to it’s own. The Desktops presently available on it are Gnome and Mate, though Gnome is a special edition known as Sparkle, and it does not operate properly with X2go. Presently X2go and ssh are the only two access methods. I am working on the others. Rocky8.Eskimo.Com Rocky8 is a RedHat derived operating system very similar to Centos before Centos was absorbed, and ruined, by Redhat. While Centos support, with the exception of Centos9 is going away on June 30th, 2024, and CentOS9 is not usable because of the deletion of NIS by RedRat which is necessary to our organization, Rocky8 will be supported for security updates through May of 2029, thus provides us a means of continuing to offer a Redhat based environment for another five years.
Ubuntu.Eskimo.Com Ubuntu can be accessed graphically using x2go and the Mate Desktop. The native Unity desktop is a compositing desktop which is incompatible with x2go. This machine is equipped with many applications including a huge number of games, a rich assortment of development tools and computer programming languages, a huge assortment of Office productivity software, many scientific, electronic, and educational tools. Zorin.Eskimo.Com Zorin is a Ubuntu derived operating system. It combines the eye candy of some other Ubuntu flavors such as Mint, with the security awareness and up to date nature of Ubuntu providing a really superb server environment. This machine is our best equipped server. It has the full Ubuntu Studio Suite, a very large assortment of development tools, language packs for all supported languages, many games, both Libre and Caligra Office Suites, and much more. X2go is supported on this machine.
Crontab access, batch, and background jobs are allowed on all of our servers. Most have unrestricted outbound access with the exception of kali owing to high abuse potential for tools that exist on it.
The backrooms game is a surreal, eerie setting that began as a simple image posted on 4chan in May 2019—a photo of a yellowish, seemingly endless office space, lit by fluorescent lights and lined with stained carpet. This single unsettling image sparked an entire mythos: a liminal world that exists just beyond reality, where you might accidentally "noclip" out of the world and find yourself trapped in its infinite, monotonous halls.
U.S. — An alarming report from the Foundation for Communal Socialistic Equity has confirmed that Trump's signature "Big Beautiful Bill" will cause 175 billion people to lose their Medicaid and die horrible deaths.
Zohran Mamdani, the openly socialist Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City, proposed buying up private properties to “convert” them into communes in a 2021 instructional video for the far-left Gravel Institute.
The fact remains that the strategic value of nuclear arms lies almost totally on the side of defense. Obtaining nuclear weapons is a way of getting reliable defensive capability on the cheap. This is why small, relatively powerless countries want them. North Korea can shell Seoul from the DMZ with conventional weapons fairly easily, but having a few nukes certainly hasn’t hurt North Korea’s ability to keep much larger powers at bay. Pakistan’s status as a nuclear power means it faces no true threat of invasion from foreign powers, even large ones.
While they do not ensure a complete lack of armed aggression against one’s territory, they have shown that they will prevent all-out foreign invasion or any foreign action that threatens the existence of a nuclear-armed state. (The end of the USSR shows that internal threats to a regime can be maintained without nuclear war.) And at a relatively low price tag. In other words, countries with nuclear weapons need not face the dreaded “unconditional surrender” demand that is standard practice for the US in its conflicts with non-nuclear powers.
Some of Ukraine’s allies are shifting their focus elsewhere just as the war-battered nation struggles with a fresh volley of missile and drone attacks in its fourth summer of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
@DaddyO @SirAndrewTheGreat this was the plan all along. There was never any desire by Evers to work with the legislature to come up with a new law. It was to get a solid liberal majority on the court (all rich white frustrated women) and strike it down so WI can have 100% unfettered abortions.
@SirAndrewTheGreat @DaddyO that’s the liberal-speak they want to get into the everyday lexicon. Put into the official transcripts so years from now, historians will see it and think, “how brilliant of them”.🙄
@DaddyO @SirAndrewTheGreat they pretty much had to because all the libs in Madistan (and the other liberals across the country who funded these elections) were screaming for some sort of action on it.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian officially notifies the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to implement the parliament's decision to halt cooperation with the IAEA. english.alahednews.news/fastne…
Alahednews - Fastnews - Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian officially notifies the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to implement the parliament’s decision to hal...
I'm not gonna lie, guys, neither say the opposite: there are people who play in their phones, I bet you do, so do I. I'm curious to know what do you play in your phones, what kind of "phone gamer" are you. Remember PDAs? The only games that things had were mineswipper, solitaire, chess, sudoku among others. All those are games that perfectly use the touch capabilities of its device, but now, we have more process capacity, and we still have one touch screen (I know, you can touch many points of the screen at the same time). I've always seen the screen of my phone as a one big button, so, I can't play any game that needs more than one touch to be played. I do limit my catalogue of games to those mentioned above, and I really like them. I love sudoku.
Venezuela's Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello denounced an international terrorist network transporting weapons of war from Colombia to Venezuela to carry out simultaneous attacks against healthcare infrastructure, diplomatic missions, and represent…
Iranian retaliatory strikes against Israel once again exposed the regime’s military strategy of placing critical military facilities in civilian areas and using settlers as human shields.
putin is attacking civilians? I thought there was a war going on between the US/Ukraine and Russia, and Ukraine has been supplied with weapons and money enough to cover their entire GDP for 2 years and running.
Ukrainian war pages constantly talk about exchanges of weaponry, but you are saying its a war against civilians eh? Not a war, then?
That certainly waters down the ACTUAL war against civilians (genocide) happening also with US backing. Strange wording.
@nanook I don't watch TV. Haven't for over 20 years. Im a student of history and I do a lot of research, and it isnt confusing or hidden knowledge at all.
Especially since it's all in the congressional record. Did you know the US congress debated the issue, and agreed to quote "allow US congressional funds and weapons to fall into the hands of Azov neonazis", specifically, years before any of this happened? Is the congressional record "tv" friend?
@RussianChineseDeepStateSock @Malcolm Nance I wish that had not happened, but anything to further Nato right? Still feel the story is a bit unrepresentative and something I'd expect from MSNBC.
@nanook wait so you understand that the US congress funded and supplied Azov, but you also see my analysis of America's latest proxy war against Russia as an "msnbc" story? I don't really follow. This can be viewed in the congressional record, cspan, etc. The US also shot down peace talks twice, and this is certainly not a "war against civilians" any more than ALL wars are. Calling it that in this world, right now, of course is a tactical decision that hurts Palestine.
We're so pleased that you've decided to give diaspora* a try. It's fantastic that you've joined us!
We hope that you quickly find your way here, and enjoy getting connected with people and content.
Here's a few tips for getting started:
There are some step-by-step tutorials on our project website covering the basics of how diaspora* works, and how to get connected with people. There's a link to these in the side-bar, should you ever want to read them in future, and there's also an in-app Help section you can access through your user menu (at the right-hand end of the header bar).
You can search for people by name or by diaspora* ID (which looks like an email address), if you know it, from the search field in the header bar. You can invite people to join you in diaspora* by sending them a link to our project website, from where they can choose their own pod to register with. Your friends don't need to be on the same pod as you in order to connect and communicate with you.
One good way to start getting connected with people is to start following some #tags of subjects that interest you (maybe #music, #photography, #linux, or #activism ... whatever interests you) so that you will see content on those topics in your stream. You can then start following people whose posts you find interesting, by placing them into one of your aspects.
If you have any questions, post something with the #question or #help tag, and people will try to help you. Make sure to make your post public so anyone who can help is able to see it!
diaspora* has some very simple community guidelines, which we hope everyone will feel able to follow so that all members can have the best possible experience here.
We're trying to improve diaspora* all the time, fixing bugs, honing performance and adding new features. But how fast we can do this is limited by the time developers have. To improve diaspora* faster, we need more developers! If you've just signed up and can code, or know someone who can and who might be interested in joining our team, get in touch!
The New York Times completely failed in its effort to upend Zohran Mamdani. They are unable to understand his wide support because they refuse to acknowledge the rage surging through the Democratic base over Israel's genocide in Gaza. mondoweiss.net/2025/07/the-big…
The New York Times completely failed in its effort to upend Zohran Mamdani. They are unable to understand his wide support because they refuse to acknowledge the rage surging through the Democratic base over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The outcome of this vote will, at best, slow down the rate at which the American government gravitates towards plutocracy, police statism and global corporate Empire. -- Kevin Carson
A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.
This is a well-written post. I agree that “friction” involved with small changes and incompatibility with some Linux binaries are significant downsides. I think NixOS makes a lot of sense for development environments, but it’s not my preference for a personal device
I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.
I'm always on the go, swapping PCs, travelling for medical reasons. Buy, sell, trade hardware. Nix allows me to boot into my system as if I never left with a simple hardware config update script. Rock solid consistency.
Is your hardware always the exact same? Because if it isn't, then I'm sure you have to do modifications to your config file. And at that point you night as well just use a regular distro instead.
So what the main hassle of switching is that you have to run your hardware file to update for your new hardware, then inside your Nix config rarely will I ever have to edit things (maybe UUIDS if totally new machine fresh nix install/but I usually ssd swap for ease of transition and speed, or even clonezilla multiple drives and use as needed) even drivers for example. I've got auto scripts setup to run that will automatically pull any drivers or updates from the base system nix update to any drivers.
There's really only two files you ever have to touch that I've used. Nix hardware, nix config. Once hardware is updated for which system you on you'll never touch that until you boot a new machine with different hardware. If you setup nix how it's supposed to be. Nix config is your master file. A single backup of that and when setup correctly. I can boot like I never left my machine. I'm talking librewolf still has my accounts open and logged in. VPN works. It's all seamless damn near.
You have to learn to play within nixos sandbox meaning understand what your capable of doing and do it all inside config. With a few auto scripts, and 3 or 4 common commands on desktop page for whatever you wanna do and its terminal and memory hands off. I've what I call dumb Monkey commented my entire config and its in order if boot process from power on machine to boot, etc to shutdown.
A regular distro still poses many many more challenges when hardware swapping. You have different files to remember fstab, etc etc which can lead to mental memory load and system clutter if you didn't build and maintain a perfect system from the beginning with stuff like files, sym links, all sorts if tweaks you've made over time.
So I switched to nix to mitigate those things. Now I've made a master config file copy, auto updates, backups, etc is all automated in the background now. All contained in my nix config. It's supremely stable. Mental load is zero. Fills my use case. Immutable.
You have nothing to lose and only to gain. Pick any desktop environment and setup to your liking. I came from windows, to mint, to full custom nix all my apps, browsers, luks, apparmour, firejail, the whole stack.
I've tried live boots of many other distributions but this is the cleanest, leanest, most manageable of them all. My only true concern is project lasting long-term. For now. Aside from not having GUFW. I'm happy. I think there's just a lot if misinfo and lack of hands on use from most people or incorrectly setup systems to utilize how nix should be ran. I think that should iron out over time.
You can manage multiple machines with a single Nix configuration git repository and modularize the configuration as much as you want. You can have a config with a desktop environment that you skip on servers, override individual variables for a specific host or do whatever you want. You can even remote deploy it all with a simple nixos-rebuild build --target-host "user@host" and it works across different architectures too (e.g. build on your fast x86 machine and deploy to a slow RaspberryPi).
Loved nixOS but couldn't install PIA VPN gui and disliked the workarounds. Also doing .net dev was more awkward than I liked so went back to Arch and wrote some scripts to install all the packages I want instead. Love the idea of nixOS though.
I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.
Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.
I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use. For example, I love KDE, but they really don't do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.
I think you over complicating your view here. I daily nix. Your not carrying a bunch if dot files. You have one. A single nix. Config. That's it. It's not big, long, messy, what so ever. I have mine commented by section from boot order to auto updates and backups. Your talking about 150 lines of extremely short and almost self explanatory code. I came from mint having never used nix. I figured it out doing a custom luks install and the whole custom build from scratch in no time.
Your diff issue is overblown. The edits you make are small and you cannot get lost in multiple configs unless your doing entire system writes which you would never do. I use a dead light weight diff GUI or terminal. This has to be one if the cleanest, maintenance free distros I have ever used.
It doesn't seem you have truly driven Nix with this take. No program writes directly to your config, even if there was say your temp scenario you reboot and temps would wipe away like you never did them unless you rebuild nix config. Most of your concerns would fall away once you really drove nix to see how it functions.
Yeah, you understood my comment entirely the wrong way around. When I say "dotfiles", I mean the non-Nix way of managing application configurations. Nix Home-Manager happens to write to these dotfiles, but that means I don't have to deal with the dotfiles myself.
I've used nixos exclusively lately. It's been awesome. No system scatter, clutter. It'd immutable. There's very slight driver hassle (you don't have GUI for drivers so a simple terminal command fetches everything you need.) in cinnamon. I came from mint. I have all basic commands in executable files on desktop for ease of hassle. It's not about rebuilding the system. Its about being hands off. Next to zero maintenance because not much in your system gets altered. I went for a full custom install from terminal. The only thing I personally miss being GUI is a firewall like UFW or GUFW.
Overall its more rock solid and workable than likely every distro I have ever tried. The feature set is nice, easy rollbacks, fucking cake backups. All you have to know is your entire system lives on one small editable file called nix. Configuration. Keep it in a micro SD or USB or any backup and it's as if you never left. Any changes you want you simply tweak in the config then reboot. If it breaks then select your previous gen number on boot and your exactly where you was before.
I diff my edits and keep copies, run auto backups, and more. It's so hands off that I haven't found a better replacement yet. My single biggest concern is long-term viability in the project.
This is a good example of what people consistently overlook/misunderstand, when it comes to Nix.
Obviously you can remount a /home, or just pull the dotfiles from a personal repo, but the strength of Nix is also in that I can re-create my entire config exactly how it is defined. If i were to setup a machine completely from scratch, with a mature enough config, it will get me from 0 to my exact desktop completely unattended.
But there are also many more advantages to it, at least in my eyes. Let's take trying/tweaking new packages as an example. Yesterday I pulled an old repo for an Outer Wilds mod. The thing needs a dev environment, and a mod manager for the actual game. A nix shell got me both, I finished my work, and when I exit out of fish, both are gone, just as I wanted them to be.
Another good example would be partial os updates. I've used Arch for almost 9 years before switching to Nix, and pretty much a top3 Arch rule is not doing partial updates, or partial rollbacks. In case of a breakage, I would have to manually redownload an older version of a tarball, pacman -U the package, and then hope i'm not cooked. In the case of gcc incompatibilities, it can quickly become a massive pain in the ass. My nix flake would never experience this problem, because I already have two different scenarios available - either i build based on an older lockfile from my git repo, or I create an overlay for a specific input I need, so that it still pulls what it needs, and doesn't interfere with the rest of my system
You only have one machine? I benefit from sharing configs between the laptop and the desktop. They are not the same, but I can easily copy paste a complex service I defined in my desktop to do the same thing on my laptop
I have a desktop, laptop, and a few VMs and servery things. Dotfile manager (yadm, which is a git wrapper) to sync personal settings, everything else I just do manually. The system-level configs are either different enough that standardizing them isn’t very helpful, or no more complicated than installing packages and activating services.
Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I'll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.
But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn't happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it's just not for non-technical Linux users.
Untrue. I came from windows, to Linux mint, then now I daily nix. I'm an average person who prefers to be terminal hands off. I did a full custom install from my mint setup to nix, apps, luks, the entire swap and booted as if I never left basically. I faltered a few times and had to select previous generations in my boot menu but honestly it'd because somehow I fucked up my UUIDs. The learning curve is there but let me assure you it's minimal in terms of linux, and it's dead stable because nothing changes without you doing it. In 1000 years it should still be running Unadultered.
Meanwhile me as a barbarian installing Debian and copying my ~/.bashrc file (and a few others) if not just remounting /home/ in the new installation every few years.
The biggest downside to containers vs. Nix for me is that Nix can produce binaries for Linux and macOS, whereas docker only helps with Linux unless you can perform literal magic to cross-compile your project on Linux for macOS.
Containers also don't give you reproducible environments, and Nix does.
That said, Nix documentation is ass, so I usually end up going with containers because they require far less suffering to get working because writing a containerfile is much easier than guessing how to hobble together a Nix flake with a mostly undocumented language.
Skipped to the "ugly" part of the article and I kind of agree with the language being hard?
I think a bigger problem is that it's hard to find "best practices" because information is just scattered everywhere and search engines are terrible.
Like, the language itself is fairly simple and the tutorial is good. But it's a struggle when it comes to doing things like "how do I change the source of a package", "how do I compose two modules together" and "how do I add a repo to a flake so it's visible in my config". Most of this information comes from random discourse threads where the responder assumes you have a working knowledge of the part of the codebase they're taking about.
I always aim at packages and issued inside my nix config cuts all this hassle out atleast for me.. Ive got everything pretty meticulously commented and in order of boot process and in general running step by step order. I'm pretty sure I dumb monkey could figure out how it runs. I came from windows then mint then nix. To give you an idea of my PC knowledge. I think the whole point if nix is to keep the system contained and not scattered. I see many posters mentioning system scatter on nix as an issue and I have no idea how theu managed to complicate one if the simplest systems I've ever used as far as clean, tidy, goes.
I've been stuck on Nix for two weeks because I thought it would be a good idea to put a distro I had never used but that wouldn't break on my backup laptop in case my main one ever broke. I just couldn't force myself to install debian, not that I have anything against debian, it's just... kinda boring, while Nix seemed very interesting. IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME I SWEAR.
Guess what happened... I broke Arch. Then I reinstalled and the next day the laptop broke. Then the next day I tried to get my data back and the hard drive broke. So, backup laptop with Nix for two weeks...
I really really really like the declarative stuff. Installing packages through config files is so nice I'll never lose track of what I've installed ever again 🥰 🥰 🥰 I was already using a git repo for all my config files + GNU Stow to symlink everything to its proper place, so adding the .nix configs to that setup was very easy.
Having a clean system on rebuild is great. No more clutter left everywhere that I don't know about, no more half broken stuff left lying around.
But... - It's not Arch. Not Nix's fault, but I kept hearing that it would be "like Arch but declarative"... and it's really not 😑 Everything seems over-complicated vs as simple as possible. - I absolutely hate the language. - What's with those error messages from hell??? - And speaking of hell, every language that can't just use indentations like YAML instead of cluttering the code with {} and [] and () should have been relegated to the darkest pit of hell 20 years ago. But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea) - Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it's unfair since it's not trying to be a rolling release... but... but...) - Where are the source packages? Is that an Arch only thing? I liked having packages that automatically use the latest git commit without needing to manually install from source and manually reinstall each time I want an update like a medieval peasant... 😭 - Nix packages are weird. Even someone who's terrible at coding like me can read Arch PKGBUILDS... I miss you Arch 😢 - Apps not working because of paths that don't exist on Nix... what do you mean I need to patch the package myself? 😭 But at least there's steam-run, great preserver of what's left of my sanity. - ~~Can't wrap my head around installing some stuff like VSCode extensions (the advice I got was "don't bother just do it imperatively...)~~ (Edit: Finally figured it out!!!) - Wiki is often sparse on info and not very helpful if you don't already know what you are doing (and I clearly don't 😅) - Hidden configs. Some stuff works on its own like pipewire even though I haven't installed or configured it (I went with a minimal install that just gave me a tty then build from there, no DE), and how it's already configured is not in the default config files. It's very confusing not knowing why some stuff works and how it's configured by default.
But it's kinda growing on me. Like mold. Or cancer. Brain cancer.
Yes it's a headache if you don't have a clue what you're doing and suck at coding like me, but the good parts might make the headache worth it depending on what you want of your distro. A week ago I couldn't wait to get a new laptop to reinstall Arch, but now I'm actually wondering if I should keep trying Nix... OH GOD HAVE I CAUGHT THE NIX BRAIN CANCER? 😭
I'm just seeing your comment after I recommended Guix, that I could read and understand Guile Scheme is what made me hop away from NixOS, the nixlang is an ungrokable mess
I'm not a fan of nested parenthesis... but aside from that I don't know much about the language, is it more convenient? Does it also suffer from the error messages from hell problem?
Guix is a distribution of the GNU operating system.
Guix is technology that respects the freedom of computer users.
You are free to run the system for any purpose, study how it
works, improve it, and share it with the whole world.
That is something you can't quite escape in Nix either. While it doesn't use parenthesis like a Lisp, the nature of the language and the depths of the sets you are dealing with still makes you end up getting a lot of this at the end of your files:
];
};
};
};
}
Having one } too many or too few is a pretty common issue with Nix and feels very similar to Lisp, even when the rest of the language is quite different.
While some people love putting Lisp in everything, I really don't get it. Guix is far uglier than Nix in the language department. Scheme is not a configuration language and thus has none of the nice things that Nix has (multi-line string handling, defaults, lazy evaluation, inline expression, etc.), instead you get multiple levels of macro spaghetti. Furthermore, Guix forces you to turn everything into Scheme, where you can just use plain Bash in your Nix build steps, in Guix that is all Scheme.
I had spent a lot of years with Scheme before starting with Guix and then spend quite a few years with that, but even after all that switching to Nix just felt so much better instantly. Instead of trying to hack a DSL onto of Scheme you just get a language that's actually build for the task.
But points to Nix for being less awful than JSON (the comma on every line but not the last thingy make me want to build a time machine to go murder the grandparents of whoever thought it was a good idea)
Packages are out of date even in the unstable branch (I know it’s unfair since it’s not trying to be a rolling release… but… but…)
Sure, some packages are outdated. But in terms of percentage of up-to-date packages, it's (AFAIK) the best out of any distro repo. And that's perhaps even more impressive of a feat when realizing it also sports the biggest repo. For actual stats: repology.org/repositories/stat…
Wait how does Nix Unstable have a better score than the AUR? With four times less maintainers? That's really impressive, especially considering how much more simple Arch packages are to make.
Nix has more up to date packages than most distros have packages in total. There's a bot that goes around updating them automatically if they are from github. Maybe there's an issue with your package?
It's reproducible, so random updates are a no-no. You can however just dump the Git URL in your flake.nix inputs and then override the src of the package with that. The source gets updated when you do nix flake update next time. Something like this:
Finally managed to enable VSCode extensions without doing it imperatively or using home manager I'm so happy I could cry 😭 😭 😭
It actually wasn't even that bad, I'm just terrible at understanding documentation I guess
(vscode-with-extensions.override {
vscodeExtensions = with vscode-extensions; [
bodil.blueprint-gtk # Gtk Bluprint language support
ms-vscode.makefile-tools # Makefile language support
bbenoist.nix # Nix language support
ms-python.python # Python language support
naumovs.color-highlight # Color Highlight
ms-azuretools.vscode-docker # Docker
donjayamanne.githistory # Git History
seatonjiang.gitmoji-vscode # Gitmoji
];
})
You absolutely do. If you build a container and publish it you will pull down that exact thing every time. How is that not "reproducibility"?
You no what though? Scratch that - who gives a fuck? Bit-for-bit reproducibility takes far more effort than it's worth anyway. Even NixOS isn't completely reproducible. It's a false goal.
For dev environments, repeatable is okay.
It's well more than good enough you mean.
If you want actually reproducible binaries that you can ship, Nix is better fit for that purpose.
with ansible, you are responsible for making sure that executing the described steps in the described order leads to the desired result
with nix, you describe what you want your system to look like, and then figuring out how to get there is nix's problem (or rather, is obvious to nix thanks to nixpkgs)
It's missing the fact that the nix store can be huge, even if garbage collected regularly. This prevents me from using nix on my Ubuntu laptop with limited HDD space.
I haven't had any issues thus far. But I have not used a lot of appimages. Usually I can find everything in nixpkgs, and those that I didn't all worked with appimages.
I'm not quite sure why you fetishise a bit-for-bit over semantic equivalence. Doesn't it turn "it works on my machine" into "it works on my machine as long as it has this sha: ... "?
Let me disagree there, the language is trivial. It's just JSON-lookalike with expressions, with a lot of nice touches that make using it much easier than all the alternatives (e.g. sane multi-line string handling, lazy evaluation, default values, powerful key/value sets, etc.). The only real stumbling for me when first encountering it was realizing that functions can only take a single argument (which can be a key/value set) and that functions are literally just : (e.g. (a: a + 5) 6 => 11). That's easily missed if you just look at a file without reading the documentation.
The thing that makes it hard is just the complexity of the actual package collection, your configuration contains literally your whole system, and it's not always obvious where to find the thing you need, since sometimes it's a plain package, sometimes it is a services.foobar.enable = true and sometimes you have to fiddle with override or other package specific things. Knowing that search.nixos.org/ exists is half the battle here.
There is also the lack of static typing that can lead to rather verbose error messages, but it's not like many other configuration formats have that either.
There are a few gnarly things about Nix, even for someone who's familiar with Haskell (the most similar language to Nix that's even close to mainstream).
Dynamic typing (you mention this briefly). Some people like the extra flexibility that dynamic typing gives, but there's a tradeoff: more errors. The thing is, due to NixOS's complicated structure, the traceback for an evaluation error might not give you any information about where the cause is (indeed, the traceback might not include a single line of your own code!). This makes errors unusually costly in NixOS specifically, so any language feature that causes more runtime errors automatically has a worse impact than it would in a more "normal" language.
The "standard library" (builtins) is extremely sparse. You basically have to depend on at least nixpkgs-lib if you want to get any real work done.
No real data abstraction mechanisms. No ADTs, no nominal types. The only composite types are attrsets and lists. The usual way to encode a custom type is as an attrset with a _type field or some such.
While we're at it, very limited pattern-matching.
Clunky list literal syntax: no commas between list elements. I can't tell you the number of times I've forgotten to surround list elements in parentheses.
Can anyone remember the rules for escaping ${ or ''? I have to look them up every time.
I'm not quite sure why you think pointing out someone's confidently incorrect claim that containers do give you reproducible environments means that I fetishsize anything?
But if you genuinely want to know why reproducibility is valuable, take a look at reproducible-builds.org/.
I was quite happy to see that Debian and Arch have both made great strides into making tooling that enables reproducible packages in recent times. It's probable that, because of efforts like this, creating reproducible builds will become easier/possible on most Linux environments, including traditional container workflows.
For now though, Nix Flakes are much better at enabling reproducible builds of your software than traditional containers, if you can suffer through Nix not being documented very well. This article covers some more details on different build systems and compares them with Nix Flakes if you want more concrete examples.
FWIW, I think that containers are awesome, and using them for dev environments and CI tooling solves a lot of very real problems ("it works on my machine", cheap and easy cross-compilation for Linux systems, basic sandboxing, etc.) for people. I use containers for a lot of those reasons. But if I need to make something reproducible, there are better tools for the job.
I really want to like Nix. The idea of declaratively defining my entire system sounds great. I can manage it with Git and even have multiple machines all look the same. I can define my partititioning once and magically get a btrfs disk working. Wow!
But I find the language confusing no matter how many times people say it's easy. I have a lot of experience with other programming languages so maybe it just doesn't mesh. It also gives terrible error messages that are hard for me to understand. And Nixpkgs is unpredictable for what version I'm going to get. One of the services I installed ended up being a release candidate version which was a surprise. What if I don't want the latest version of Docker? How do I pin it? Do I have to duplicate part of Nixpkgs? It just feels like a monorepo where everybody has to be on the same versions. Why on earth do the Nix language docs start by introducing math expressions instead of here is a simple self contained thing that installs one program. Here's how you configure it. Here's how you expand. Why does the dependency graph seem to pull in so many unnecessary dependencies? For example, I tried to build a minimal Docker image (which Nix looks to be a very good fit for), but I couldn't figure out how to strip out dependencies that likely were only used during build for a dependency.
I still like the idea and have managed to get my server defined entirely with NixOS which is very cool, but I can't recommend this to my tech friends because if I'm confused they will be more so.
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Turkey’s news agency Anadolu has exposed the extensive devastation caused by Israel’s airstrike on Iran’s Evin Prison, highlighting a deliberate massacre of detainees, civilians, and staff.
@jeremiah there is no need to remake any of the original trilogy. They’ll just ruin it with CGI, or completely rewrite the story, like they did with Jumanji.
@CattleBaronI don't know anything about the pressures and stuff yet. I have 2 vehicle AC units I need to replace and haven't pulled the first part. Check Eric The Car Guy or South Main Auto on YouTube, or even look for a manufacturer's video.
This post got a lot more interest than expected! Currently working on revising this post to incorporate the excellent suggestions from Hacker News. Having said that, please still provide feedback.
A bombshell new CIA review of the Obama administration’s spy agencies assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Donald Trump was deliberately corrupted by then-CIA…
A delegation of anti-Zionist Rabbis expressed solidarity at the #Iranian Mission to the #UnitedNations in #NYC , offering condolences to the Iranian nation f...
What do you mean by that? The Neturei Karta rejects the idea of a Jewish state altogether, so they're most probably strongly opposed to what's happening in Gaza.
I find a little disturbing what they say about the Iranian government. I don't believe they're any better than any other government.
Thanks a lot @Sunyata ☸ 👨🏻💻 ☮! This is very important, because people like me could, knowing that N.Y. has a huge Jewish community, think that they tolerate this abomination... I would have been very sad because I red and valued Jewish culture a lot....
On Monday, 30 June 2025, Palestinian prisoners’ institutions reported the martyrdom of Louay Faisal Mohammed Nasrallah (Turkman), 22, imprisoned by the occupation, in Soroka Hospital. He had …
Generally true, but the ones out at our city park have totally rusted out underneath. Nobody's been pissing on them, they're just exposed to the weather.
If I remember later today, I might take a photo of the pair of water fountains at our park. The top stainless steel side looks perfectly fine, but the metal panel underneath both of them is totally rusted out. I'm pretty sure they disabled/disconnected both of them.
Not sure where I might post the photo though, guess I might post under Nowhere Else To Post.. 🤷
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network expresses our full solidarity with Palestine Action, threatened with proscription by the British imperialist regime because of their direct action t…
Hi fellow #HEMA enthusiasts, Friend of mine is crowdfunding the English translation of his book, "Unboxing Fabris", which is actually two books. My friend is a HEMA instructor, and together with master Óscar Torres, he has studied, analysed, break down and rebuild the techniques of Italian master Salvator Fabris. They have condensed all this work in the first book, and written a full training method in the second. The whole thing is illustrated with a ton of photos.
I have the Spanish version and I can only recommend it.
Nanook
in reply to Unicorn Riot • •@Unicorn Riot
We all expect opposition from the Welfare class, but the nation can't survive if it keeps going in the direction it has been.