nix

It’s just good business, cutting costs that only affects the quality of the product, but not the bottom line

Scarcity breeds innovation /s

These are not cat ears, but rather squinted eyes of a happy face

At least that was my interpretation at the time

No

If you are particularly deranged, you can also use “^^”

It’s a cool shell, I use it as a daily driver (though I’m keeping a close eye on elvish which syntactically is even further away from classic shell), but the comments read like fish is basically zsh. And while zsh is pretty close to bash, fish isn’t.

Be aware that fish isn’t a POSIX-compatible shell enough, so you have to adjust syntax.

There are plenty nowadays from what I remember.

1. They save on the ARM licensing fees. I’m not sure about the details, but I believe it’s both a flat fee and cost per chip produced
2. They can freely add proprietary vendor extensions, which I’m not sure ARM allows
3. They’re less restricted in general chip design (I think ARM has restricted options in the last years, Apple has some special privileges as a founding member)

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