tech, politics (sort of?), long
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.
tech, politics (sort of?), long
@alexispurslane Yeah, if you need something that Just Works, then I definitely wouldn't recommend hopping over to NixOS - or at least just running it in a VM to experiment with, or so.
Basically, you should expect to need at least a week to find your way around it in its current state (it works *very* differently from other distros!), and several months of intermittently running into things where you're not quite sure how to approach them on NixOS.
That having been said, complicated drivers (like eg. GPU drivers) are actually notably one of the things that's much easier on NixOS than on most other distros :)
Not in the least because you can just boot into an older version of your system from the bootloader, if you mess up some system/kernel configuration - and AFAIK all of the drivers are packaged in nixpkgs by default, including the proprietary and weird ones.
tech, politics (sort of?), long
@joepie91 that sounds very intriguing for sure - but until it's more robust and I'm less stressed out of my mind from school I think I'll stick with PopOS. PopOS is just Easy, especially since I have a gaming laptop w/ an Nvidia GPU.