Skip void, try NixOS :P (my colleague switched from void too)

Nah that title already holds NixOS

Additionally to what the others already said:

LD50 and “bad for your health” are quite separate things.

Vitamin D for example has an LD50 of ~30mg per kg. So according to your logic, it’s way unhealthier than aspartame (factor ~100). Though in reality you would die without vitamin D intake.

You can almost never say that something is not dangerous, unless it’s practically mathematically proven…

This applies especially for food etc.

I think we have to be much more conservative with food and substances we put into it. A lot of (Meta-)meta-studies suggest, that processed food is a health risk.

And this may sound a little bit far-fetched, but I think a good amount of the idiocracy in (especially) the USA may be related to the food (as also a lot of studies have found connections to brain/psychological health).

I think we reached a singularity here…

Bullschwein Bingo - alle Punkte!

Maybe create a PR at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui ?

expansive repositories

That would be new for me. AFAIK Debian doesn’t have that many packages (compared to AUR or even nixpkgs (see https://repology.org/)). Regarding Flatpak: What packages do you need for a server with Flatpak? Desktop makes sense for me, but I haven’t yet had any use-case/package for server related software in Flatpak.

I switched from Debian to NixOS for servers, 3 years ago, as I think it’s easier to maintain long-term (after being on Debian on servers for years). A new install (after EOL Debian support) often is a little bit more hassle and requires a longer downtime in my experience (apart from the lack of reproducibility and declarativeness and the sheer amount of software packaged and configured in nixpkgs).

Have you tried putting it into a buildFHSUserEnv?

I also often put the “dirty” packaged AI/python stuff (which is unfortunately quite a lot) into Dockerfiles if I don’t want to package it cleanly with Nix.

Well I guess it depends how deep you’re in the rabbit hole already, I think it’s relatively easy for me at this point to create a new package (I’m maintainer already for quite a few). But yeah … steep learning curve … Less so with Nix itself, though non-the-less, it’s a simple functional programming language with a new paradigm (derivations). But rather NixOS/nixpkgs Nix magic. For example there’s a dynamic dependently typed type-system built on top of untyped Nix in the NixOS module system that is spin up on evaluation time.

But I understand your point, at the beginning of my NixOS journey I have also rather created a “good enough” Dockerfile. Depending on the exact context I still do this nowadays (often because there’s an official well maintained docker image in comparison to a not so well maintained Nix one, and the context is too complex to maintain/develop/extend it myself). But if there’s a good solution in Nix I rather use that, and that is often less headache than setting up a service with e.g. docker-compose. I also use flakes mostly for a dev environment, if you’re a little bit deeper in it, you can spin up a relatively clean dev env in short time (I’m often copy pasting the ones I have written from different projects, and change the packages/dependencies).

As I said it has a steep learning curve and documentation is pretty much the nixpkgs repo itself (well after understanding the basics of Nix and NixOS at least, with the combination of the https://nixos.wiki mostly IMO). It also takes some time to get used to the quirks of NixOS (and understanding the necessary practical design decisions of these quirks).

But I have nowadays seldom trouble with switching the generations (i.e. nixos-rebuild switch), unless you’re updating flake inputs or (legacy) channels (where e.g. a new kernel might be used). In that case it makes sense to reboot into the new configuration. Also, obviously that can lead to short down-times (including just restarting a systemd service, if a service has changed in between the generations), if that is unacceptable, there obviously needs to be a more sophisticated solution, like kubernetes via e.g. kubnix. I’m not sure how much of that can be achieved with Ansible, as I haven’t used it that much because I disliked the “programming” capabilities of the Ansible yaml syntax (which feels kinda hacky IMHO).

But apart from NixOS, one can also just use Nix on a different system to e.g. deploy or create docker images (which can be really compact, as only the necessary dependencies for a package is packaged) that in turn could e.g. be managed with Ansible or something…

Honestly, unless you’re using Nix within something like docker images (Nix has great support for writing really minimal docker images) or use it to just build software (which is also a great use-case), I would rather go straight to NixOS, in my experience it’s a smoother experience than using Nix on a different distro and e.g. services (like standalone home-manager) .

If you’re up for it: NixOS!

It’s quite a steep learning curve, but after some time (after you’ve configured your “dream-system”) you don’t want to go back/switch to any different distro.

Specifically servers IMHO are a great use-case for NixOS. It’s usually simpler to configure than a desktop distro, and less of the usual pain points of “dirty” software (like hardcoded dynamic libraries, that exist on most systems (ubuntu as reference) at that path).

I’ve much less fear maintaining my servers with NixOS because of its declarative functional reproducability and “transactional” upgrade system, than previously (where I’ve used Debian mostly).

Well reddit is currently dropping the egg…

No that’s very likely not the server, I’m experiencing it too. Maybe I’ll check out, if I can help optimize it.

Yeah totally, the federated features and especially the search could be streamlined quite a bit. I think this should be a top priority currently (to avoid centralization of the instances).

There’s a github issue for that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506

One way or the other, it’ll take time to be on par with the feature set of the good features of reddit (so everything before Steve Huffman got CEO if I remember right), especially in a federated way.

Also I don’t think it’s at least currently the goal to get the whole reddit userbase onto lemmy (apart from the obvious technical scaling issues that’ll arise). It was just an “unfortunate” consequence of reddits announcements that led to the sudden flush of a lot of reddit users onto lemmy. I think it needs (still) quite some time to get federation and the UX around it right (and I’m talking about basic features like user migration). Two people are just not enough, but few very passionate and idealistic/perfectionistic people will likely achieve quite a bit. Because of the announcement a lot of devs will likely contribute to the lemmy ecosystem (which is actively happening right now, if you’ll check the repos). Give it a little bit of time. I think a good maintained open source project can actually progress faster and with higher quality than most of the closed source alternatives (since I’m working in that area, a good example is Blender vs alternatives, which as of now has surpassed quite a few “competitors” with way fewer people developing it). You don’t need a lot of money for that (although obviously it would be better, let it just be for infrastructure cost).

Also github issues and PRs (or other similar platforms) actually reflect “addressing the needs” quite well. I myself have experienced it a few times and I’m seeing it in a few user-faced apps and repos a lot: I want one particular feature and it’s not implemented yet, so either I open an issue, describing my feature request well, or I start implementing it (if it’s either small, or a feature that’ll likely everyone wants), and often a lot of people want that feature too (visible e.g. via emojis), I think it’s even healthier than this layered view between corporations/operator and the user, as the user has to actively think through the feature, invest more (time) into it (even if it’s just opening a feature request issue). It’s not as easy as contacting the support, and complaining about things (which issues will likely not be communicated to devs the way it should be). Active collaboration is IMHO quite a good innovative driver.

Right, so basically this means that Lemmy (the company) will only be able to hire employees if they are single, young and in areas with low cost of living. Do you see the problem here?

Yeah but working on an open source anarchistic social media link aggregator, will likely result in exactly these people. I don’t see a big problem there, open source is dominated by different kind of people/developers. Compared to “cozy” corporate jobs, the quality of code, in my experience is much more relevant (“code is art”).

So it’s likely that a lot more idealists, who don’t value money that much will work on something like lemmy. And being able to not depend on a corporate job (and being payed for the project you’re caring about, also if it’s just enough to get around) is a dream for a lot of these people.

When you leave to employers to determine how much you “need”, you get exploited.

The unfortunate reality is, that unless you somehow “force” the user to pay for something, you’re likely get way less (money). Open source donators and donations are a fraction of the actual user base, so you have to balance the actual income (by donations) to those people who dedicate a good amount of development time…

I think he has a good point. I’m also more and more questioning my job, to the point that I reduced my my workload by 2.5x, to be able to focus on open source, although I’m now just earning enough to come around. But I’m learning much more, my skill has definitely increased in the last years in which I have focused on using the missing work time for developing open source. I’m having more fun with it: writing in the favorite language, actually relevant stuff, and if your open source contribution has actually a lot of feedback, and is (thankfully) used by a lot of people it certainly feels better than having finished a project in a corporate job. I think the QoL has certainly increased for me.

And I think these kind of people might be attracted to developing something like lemmy, and actually contributing something to society, the anarchistic thought of not being bound to these big centralized social media corporates (that produced quite a lot of bad press themselves the last few years…), and actually serve the community.