pacman is very fast and handy. The (in)famous pacman -Syu had you system completely up to date in record time.

Sometimes I miss its speed and simplicity

I mean peertube exists, and it actually integrates into the fediverse…

Honey bees aren’t at risk of extinction

Well, at least for nginx, you can specify the root (or alias if required) directive; to me, it makes very little sense to rely on defaults, you need to specify your servers / virtual hosts anyways, might as well make the configuration more self-documenting…

There’s also https://uapi-group.org/specifications/specs/linux_file_system_hierarchy/ nowadays, which aims to build on the FHS.

Well, /var/www is in fact not part of the FHS, not even optional… it doesn’t exist on my machines either. I think the better choice would be /srv/www which is an example given at https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s17.html

Is /var really such a mystery? I always understood it as the non-volatile system directory that can be written into. Like log files, databases, cache etc. /var/tmp it’s somewhat weird because a non-volatile temporary folder for me is just cache, and /var/lib is named somewhat weird because it doesn’t hold what I’d usually call libraries.

Not pictured: /opt, the raccoon

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: see above

The average Linux user definitely will not care about reproducibility.

I think a lot of people do care about it, just not under that name. But I think a lot of users asked themselves at least once “what did I do back then to achieve X”. Not in that the whole system is reproduced 1:1, but certain aspects. That’s something much easier to answer with nix.

Well, you don’t need to learn nix as a programming language for a simple installation, you can use it like a slightly different json, which the configuration.nix part was about. You can get the reproducibility aspect from just that, so I wouldn’t say you get no benefits at all without learning the language.

There are more disadvantages (like time required to rebuild because you added a single package), so Arch is the better choice depending on preferences. Arch is a very good traditional distribution in my opinion, can’t go wrong with it

Arch is easier in my opinion, at least if you want to leverage the power NixOS can offer. A simple /etc/nixos/configuration.nix maybe not, but once you enter custom options / submodule territory and use stuff like lib.mapAttrs, I’d say NixOS is quite harder. Or just a more complex overrideAttrs. But then again, Arch doesn’t have an equivalent to that…

On the other hand, why they actually enjoy this, regardless of the reasons, why would they stop?

Sony could just have ignored this

It’s us millennials coping haha

It’s not a phase!

Not as common as one would like

No issues here, but I haven’t benchmarked anything and any improvement could be placebo. It’s trivial with flakes

You probably know this, but you can even run the CachyOS kernel on NixOS. Currently doing exactly that

Nowhere does it say you have to limit yourself to that

Similarly here. Have an Odroid with that platform, it wasn’t cheap but it came with several advantages:

• 4 SATA ports on addition to the M2 slot
• Intel QSV
• 2 x 2.5 Gbit Ethernet (I only have gigabit at home though)

Very powerful machine for the power usage, I ran a really old Athlon before though (from 2010 or so that I retrofitted with 16GB RAM) that did most stuff just fine. But I wanted some transcoding and also possibly a smaller case.

I run everything bare metal though.