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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • BeOS went under.

    Ed: I was a huge apple fan, bought an apple clone from Power Computing. Then Apple revoked the licensing that allowed all the apple clone companies to exist. That’s when I went to BeOS which would run on my clone, and got a multicore intel machine too. When BeOS went under I tried Suse. Had kind of a sucky UI in my opinion, but I hung in there with linux as an alternative to windows and went Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/Nixos and I’m still on nixos now. Its pretty much my exclusive OS since I quit my job that required windows 5 or 6 years ago.






  • I think nixos is still niche, but seems to be gaining momentum. It has some unique features:

    • Every package has its own dependencies, so you can install a 7 year old firefox alongside the latest, and have no interference.
    • Packages with dependencies in common still share them (for space savings).
    • Abandons the HFS, but can still fake it for apps that need it.
    • Can make dev environments that are exactly reproducible across machines, and only exist within a specific shell session. So you can have a project that relies on an out of date version of a compiler, and another that uses the latest, and run both at the same time.
    • Make your own packages that other people can install using a git repo address.
    • The package language can also describe a machine’s configuration; systemd services, default packages, user accounts, etc.
    • You can build and remotely deploy a machine config in one line.
    • You can cross compile a machine config for another cpu architecture, like ARM.
    • OS upgrades are atomic, and reversible. If it doesn’t work out, you can go back to the previous config.
    • No reason to ever reinstall. Recently upgraded a machine that had sat in a closet for 5 years to the newest release. Flawless upgrade.
    • Nixos boasts more packages than any other distro, over 100,000.

    There are certainly downsides - poor docs, confusing core language. Instructions for installing something on say debian will not work on nixos. I do think this style of package management is the future, if perhaps not this specific implementation. It can be a pain but its also super solid.




  • pr06lefs@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlIs there a better way to browse man pages?
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    4 months ago

    Kind of off topic, but you know what would be cool? If you had an ‘man explain’ command that would define all the flags/args in a command, like:

    man explain rsync --append-verify --progress -avz -e "ssh -p 2222" root@$dip:/sdcard/DCIM/Camera newphonepix

    Would give you:

    rsync - a fast, versatile, remote (and local) file-copying tool
          --append-verify          --append w/old data in file checksum
          --progress               show progress during transfer
          --archive, -a            archive mode is -rlptgoD (no -A,-X,-U,-N,-H)
          --verbose, -v            increase verbosity
          --compress, -z           compress file data during the transfer
          --rsh=COMMAND, -e        specify the remote shell to use 
    

    etc.


  • The author seems dead set on a tauri calendar implementation. I came across what is apparently a scheduling toolkit in rust:

    https://github.com/fmeringdal/nettu-scheduler

    Which I guess could be used to build a desktop calendar app. One flaw in the ointment is that a calendar program really needs email integration. Downloading an ICS file and manually transferring that over to your calendar app isn’t going to cut it.

    Which brings us to the lack of solid calendar servers. I’ve searched but I haven’t found anything popular, OSS, easy to install, and useful for groups. Radicale exists but multi user support is a janky hack, while Nextcloud has unreliable sync. I’m looking for features like:

    • reliable calendar sync
    • sharable calendars.
    • scheduling help - when to have a meeting?
    • how many attendees for a group event, how many invited etc.