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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2023

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  • Active GuixSD user.

    Our application catalog is much smaller than many other distros simply because we don’t have the userbase large enough to surface the volunteers necessary to support it. So you will have to learn to write your own packages eventually

    That said, if you know your way around functional languages (in this case, scheme), it’s probably the easiest time I’ve ever had writing a package. Everything that goes into the script is known at the time the script is written, so weird extrinsic problems don’t really occur after you’ve written the package.

    Some stuff that you and the guix maintainers may not have the time to support will also get updated more slowly.

    Luckily flatpak exists, and is a godsend for the new wave of read-only (functional/ostree-based) OSs.

    Biggest appeal for me was having all my configuration in one place (and documented) so if I forget I did something in 6 months, it’s always staring at me in my home or system config file. You can accomplish the same thing by being diligent with say, script files, but it’s drop-dead easy to just maintain a system and home descriptor file and keep editing that.


  • Most data centers evaporative cooling from what I understand, and according to This

    Cooling towers use water evaporation to reject heat from the data center causing losses approximately equal to the latent heat of vaporization for water, along with some additional losses for drift and blowdown. In larger data centers this on site water consumption can be significant, with data centers that have 15 MW of IT capacity consuming between 80-130 million gallons annually. n this study, on-site water consumption is estimated at 1.8 liters (0.46 gallons) per kWh of total data center site energy use for all data centers except for closet and room data centers, which are assumed to use direct expansion (air-cooled chillers).

    And seeing as hyperscale data centers usually use between 20-50 megawatts per data center, and there’s three of them in Colon, that’s like at least 240 million gallons of water a year.

    Yikes.


  • The problem is that the Linux kernel is monolithic so introducing rust into it does have certain repercussions about downstream compatibility between modules.

    Right now the rust code in the kernel uses c bindings for some things and there’s a not-insignificant portion of C developers who both refuse to use rust and refuse to take responsibility if the code they write breaks something in the rust bindings.

    If it was pure C there would be no excuse as the standard for Linux development is that you don’t break downstream, but the current zeitgeist is that Rust being a different language means that the current C developers have no responsibility if their code refactoring now breaks the rust code.

    It’s a frankly ridiculous stance to take, considering the long history of Linux being very strict on not breaking downstream code.


  • Well part of what it does is grab your actual desktop background to use, and there’s a couple different ways to do that on Linux afaik

    Also I guess the file dialogs would open only to the wine prefix? My experience with wine applications and dialogs is mostly through bottles, so I’m not sure of the sandboxing…






  • You can use nix alongside guix, it’ll just double-up the dependencies on disk:

    services (append (list (service nix-service-type))
                        %base-services)))
    

    Services are, in guix terms, any configuration change to a computer, so creating your own service 99% of the time is just extending etc-service-type and creating a variable interface to fill in the config file text yourself

    Creating a service as in a daemon of some kind uses shepherd and involves extending shepherd-service-type or home-shepherd-service-type with your service description, depending on whether the service runs in root or user space.

    Shepherd service configurations aren’t actually part of the guix spec(https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/manual/shepherd.html#Defining-Services), but still use Guile, so you can interoperate them super easily.

    It’s important in guix to understand lisp pretty thoroughly, and knowing how to program lisp is still a very useful skill to have so I’d recommend learning it even if you never touch guix.


  • I use guix because, while it has a small community, the packaging language is one of the easiest I’ve ever used.

    Every distro I’ve tried I’ve always run into having to wait on packages or support from someone else. The package transformation scheme like what nixos has is great but Nixlang sucks ass. Being able to do all that in lisp is much preferred.

    Plus I like shepherd much more than any of the other process 0’s