Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@zkat The list at https://social.pixie.town/about/more may be a helpful reference

@silvermoon82@tech.lgbt I'm not in hospitals very often, but that matches my experience!

Honestly, I think that anybody tech-y with an anarchist view of the world should have a look at Nix and NixOS.

Not because they're perfect (they're not!) or because the community is universally anarchist (it's not!), but because it is one of *very* few systems I've seen where egalitarian mechanisms are built directly into its design - generally speaking, if your distro vendor can do it, then so can you, without any loss of reliability.

It (and Guix, obviously) are pretty much the only distros I know of that are designed like this. Highly robust conflict-free 'system primitives' that let you mix-and-match not just packages but also experimental concepts and system organization designs, from many different sources, and where the upstream distro is simply one of those sources with no inherent special privileges.

I won't go into *too* much detail here, but to give an impression of what I mean:
- The Nix language and stdlib are extremely minimal, basically *all* of NixOS is implemented with it, and any of your own 'system configuration code' can use all the same primitives
- nixpkgs, the 'official' package repository, is highly collaborative, without a closed-off team of packagers - *anybody* can contribute packages or updates through a PR
- In fact, NixOS itself is just a pile of Nix code within nixpkgs!
- Things are conflict-free wherever possible; all "derivations" (packages, config files, etc.) are isolated and explicitly-referenced by default, so dependency/config conflicts are essentially impossible
- That means that you can freely experiment with *totally* different methods of system organization and configuration, without breaking anything you already have or littering your system

Basically, NixOS, despite the many docs and UX issues it currently has, is one of very few systems that really gives me the sense that *the user* owns and controls their system, without compromises, and with plenty of avenues for collaboration.

And the freedom to mix-and-match from many sources with direct access to safe internals/primitives is IMO a crucial part of that - it's almost like the idea behind copyleft, where it guarantees that any downstream user is able to tinker with and control their system, regardless of how many parties are inbetween and with what intentions. More systems should take inspiration from this.

That said, before you go rushing off to distro-hop, I wasn't kidding about the docs and UX issues - it's definitely not a "works out of the box" distro yet. I'm recommending it here mainly as something to learn from and maybe tinker with.

@andiesophia I can unfortunately assure you that this *is* given as sincere advice too :| I've semi-regularly had to ban somebody from a tech support channel because they *insisted* that this was the most effective way to get help, and therefore it should be allowed...

@aral That's the thing, though - the value in Nix addressing the problem systemically isn't really for those who use it *directly* (in fact, the current UX is pretty terrible!), but rather for those downstream from people building on top of it, IMO.

That's why it saddens me that Red Hat didn't base their system on Nix - if they had, then they could *still* have produced a solid works-out-of-the-box distribution, but without the huge cliff that now exists where as soon as you want to stray outside of Red Hat-approved territory, you pretty much have to distro-hop to NixOS if you want to retain the stability.

Whereas on a Nix-based system (whether directly or even just implementing the same basic model!) it'd just be a matter of "using the same system primitives that the distro vendor used, for my own thing, and assuming that that'll work correctly".

@aral Okay, second attempt at expressing what I mean, more succinctly this time:

It's like the design objective behind the Nix model is "building a more robust foundation for users to work with their system in the way that works best for them", whereas the design objective behind the Fedora model is "releasing a more reliable product for people to consume".

@aral Honestly, I really dislike their approach, as far as I understand it? It's like it's trying to do *kind of* the same thing as Nix/NixOS are, but instead of providing a robust foundation with building blocks for everybody to use in novel ways (or hell, even building on Nix directly), they implement a really monolithic model with vendored dependencies and "the OS" as a chunk of the system with a privileged status?

Like, I can understand those sort of design choices being made in a corporate environment where there's one authoritative distributor of The System, but it just feels like it's throwing away so much potential in terms of 'democratizing' system management - like, it's trying to treat the symptoms, not the systemic problem underlying them.

@GLaDTheresCake Oh, for sure. But it's pretty much the only resource I have that I can link an average software developer to *without* immediately having them run away screaming, unfortunately...

@chemdrv Hi! There's a lot of advice being shared on #feditips, but I'd say that the most important thing to keep in mind early on is that there's no algorithmic broadcast of toots here - that makes the place feel much 'smaller' and generally cozier, but also means that you need to actively seek out and follow people who look interesting :)

@welshpixie They seem to be on the pixie.town blocklist: https://social.pixie.town/about/more

@M0YNG Same for TV shows honestly - so, so tired of the stale trope of "conflicting love interests and jealousy drive the half-baked plot because nobody can talk through it like an adult". I want to see more healthy poly relationships.