I dont. Its honestly not great. I’d rather that effort went to preserving and repairing the existing tools of the free and open web – the old protocols are extensible. Imagine if we had an RSS client with a “reblog” feature!
“Federation” adds overhead and honestly creates as many problems as it solves. It’s not a selling point, its a price tag.
optional autocomplete is a nice-to-have, eager autocomplete is a pain in the ass. as long as it only completes when I ask it to, I don’t mind.
My experience with pacman was via rwfus on steam deck. I was coming in as someone with experience with apt, npm, pip, even choco and winget on windows. My expectation from pretty much every other command line tool is that commands are verbs, flags are adverbs. So having to install with “pacman -S” (or is it “pacman -Sy”?) just feels unnecessarily cryptic. Same with “nix-env -iA”. I understand that there are some clever internals going on under the hood, but you can have clever internals and sane defaults. For instance, “npm install foo” both downloads the package to node_modules and updates package.json for me, so I can see what change was made to my environment. Nix should do that.
I’ve also seen it as pacman -Sy and pacman -Syu and so on. I really just think “install” should be a subcommand, not a flag. That’s really my only issue I guess, I’ve only ever used pacman via rwfus on steam deck so maybe my usability problem is with that.
pacman and nix are both really neat conceptually but they both fail at the most obvious usability test, which is “I just want to install a package”; its like exiting vim all over again.
edit: yes, I know you can set an alias to pacman -Sy or whatever, but if you need to set up an alias for a command to be usable, then I can’t in good faith recommend that OS to anyone, and I don’t want to use an OS I wouldn’t recommend to others.
If you’re gonna dismiss it like that then I’d love to hear what your pain points are. What’s so bad about containers for multi-platform applications?
I remember in college we took a course on economic efficiency and the short takeaway is “the free market is extremely efficient, but only when the competing parties start with equal resources. the more inequal the starting position, the less efficient the market becomes.” and to my mind that suggests that we should enforce some sort of “rubber-banding” effect so that a company needs to keep competing or else it will “drift” back to the mean over time. Something like aggressive taxes on the uber-rich and comprehensive welfare for the poor, y’know? Capitalism but with safety guards would be pretty cool.
syncthing is the easy option if you have some files you always want to have on both. if you just want to access your desktop files from your phone, I recommend Cx File Explorer for Android, it’s a file browser that supports various network file share protocols including Samba and SFTP.