There’s a meme image in this style, of a deadpan guy in the corner at a party, talking to noone, and the caption is his thoughts.

I’m that guy, and I’m thinking, “The license-filtering capabilities of AI code have made this debate pointless… unless we deal with Capitalism.”

I don’t think it’s topical in the sense of “this joke riffs on a current news cycle event,” which is how I think of “topical humour”. But it kind of is, in that this debate over licenses is ongoing since RMS invented the GPL.

Encryption is complex stuff; if you had a problem, it was with that. It sounds to me like you’re very ready to use Kubuntu, but maybe need some mentoring for encryption, if that is important to you. Very easy to mess that up if the complex fixes are too much at the moment. Note: at the moment. You learn as you go.

Edit: I don’t use ChatGPT, but I have found the google AI that shows up on search, tends to be pretty good at this sort of Linux system problem. Still might overwhelm you with acronyms and such.

On Debian I have freely installed Gnome, KDE, and one or the other of the LX ones, and had no perceptible problems.

However, I just tried to shortcut installing KDE on a vanilla Ubuntu, and boy, they don’t handle that well.

I have only skimmed the comments so someone might have already mentioned it, but distrowatch.com is an excellent site to get your head around the differences between distros. For instance, they have a direct comparison page that will list all the package and kernel versions side by side. Here is Mint and Arch - as you can see, Mint is at a 6.14 kernel (fine for most apps and hardware) but Arch has the very recent 7.2.11, which if you have very new hardware, could matter to you.

I run Debian, which has even older packages and kernel, and everything works great. Very recently though, I switched my firefox to the flatpak version, because the Debian package version didn’t have the fairly recent Split View feature, where you can put two sites side by side in your browser window - this has been desperately needed for as long as we’ve had wide screens. So that’s one example of a more recent package being more desirable.

And speaking of Flatpak, that’s yet another reason not to sweat your distro, cause you are not just limited to your apt packages, you can use snaps, you can use flatpak, You can use Nix. There’s endless ways now of getting the latest version of anything, on any version of Linux.

Don’t sweat it.

If you’re happy with things and nothing is acting weird or badly, You’re more or less golden, like folks are saying.

Where you might find that one day you want a newer kernel or packages (which is why you’d switch to Arch or one of its derivatives), is if you ever have very new hardware (or very old hardware that just got a driver pulled into the kernel - I own a Digidesign 002Rack that is ancient, but someone finally wrote a driver for it, and it’s still a great piece of audio hardware) that only has drivers in the latest kernels.

But if you’re just doing web, Office type stuff, even Steam games, you shouldn’t need anything more than you have already.

I am a fan of the KDE desktop, myself, and I recommend that everyone try it out at some point. But you should be able to install it onto Mint and just choose it when you login, again, no need to change distros.

I don’t buy it. If Datacentres were the powersipping butterflies you suggest, why all the new fossil power plants everywhere? I would probably not have given a shit about the datacentres, if not for all the new fossil pollution that is part and parcel of the construction.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Strictly speaking, I’m barely an acolyte; the cultists are the devs.

I endorse TrueNAS, mainly because ZFS. You want ZFS, I will go so far as to get on a video call with you and go over why, if I need to convince you. I used FreeNAS, the old name for the gratis, BSD-based TrueNAS, and it was brill. There are some very good videos on Youtube made by Allan Jude at Klara Systems if you want to dive in yourself.

I run my two servers on old PCs, and I echo that recommendation. You want room to expand your disk pool when needed, and you want as many cores and as much RAM as you can afford. If you don’t have ECC ram, it’s not a big deal for your files, as long as you’re running ZFS, but I would stick to containers rather than full VMs for your services. I have been using Docker, saved as Compose files, for most of my self-hosted stuff for years, and it’s nice cause I can basically nuke the server anytime Iike, import the zpool, and go start the services right back up.

I run straight Debian & FreeBSD nowadays so I cannot say what exact features are on TrueNAS these days, but ten years ago they had an easy GUI for setting up Jails (the BSD version of containers, sorta, it predates them I believe…), so I would assume that current TrueNAS does the same for Docker on some level.

Old PC running TrueNAS, that is the way.

I’m fascinated by all the humans dunking on the obvious LLM trollbot, over and over again, elsewhere in this post.

If you were around when Debian adopted Systemd, you will recognize this mass hysteria among those who do not code or maintain.

We’ve seen this movie before, when they adopted systemd. It’ll be fine.

Fundamentally, it’s got a political mission statement rather than a technological goal (ie. Debian seeks to be a very stable distro that moves slowly). All the money in the world won’t fix that, but he’s gonna have a lot of fun for the next few years.

I don’t know what the Cali gov was thinking

But it makes sense to me, based on the commercial incentive. It’s not that FreeBSD doesn’t form the basis of products that will need to comply with the law (whatever Apple calls their desktop OS for instance), but FreeBSD itself is only for the leet.

No, you don’t have to be a genius to use it, but you do need to be very weird, in that you want to use your own actual brain to solve problems, and you want to fully understand what the thing is doing, from bootup to shutdown. If that’s you, you’re a very odd person, according to many.

“Tech’s biggest names”

More like capital’s biggest scum

OpenBSD

Those are some wildly feels-based choices.

This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.

Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it’s a question of focused, tight training. What they’re doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.

It’s a big, big grift.

Pretty much this, but let me expand, as someone who got into it a few years ago, went all in for a while, realized the dysfunction you’re talking about was pretty serious and bad, and completely moved on from it, with the possibility of embracing Guix somewhere down the line…

What made me try it out: I listen to several podcasts about FOSS (hack ptui fuck Open Source), and one of them uses (used?) NixOS on their production streaming server, their OBS Studio machine. On that sort of device, you very often will get a stable configuration and then avoid upgrades and updates for as long as you can.

The nature of NixOS, though, means that you can mess around on that sucker all you want, completely wreck the bastard, and to get it back all you do is select the last-known-working build from the list you are offered at bootup. That is objectively incredible for any working studio, an industry sector I coincidentally have worked in myself. This level of creative flexibility means I hope this situation resolves for the better, perhaps with all the good people working under a new, hard-forked name. I have an old team of Technical Directors that, if I’m ever in Toronto and hanging out with them, this will be a huge topic of discussion, cause it would’ve solved so many of the challenges we faced when working together.

So basically I went all in, and it was not altogether easy to get my head around all the concepts - I never really did sort out using Flakes - but the aforementioned functionality seemed worth almost anything.

Where I said “holy shit this ain’t gonna work” and predicted today: when I learned, after several months, that when I went googling for the Wiki, I was randomly clicking on one of two sites - either (good) wiki.nixos.org, which was the up-to-date Wiki that observed some form of Code of Conduct and basically was trying to be a mainstream project, and (omg bad) umm nixos.wiki I think? Anyways, that’s the original Wiki, created during a time when the project was apparently a-okay with nazi contributors and maybe leaders, and features entries like “The NixOS Woke Invasion” as relevant topics of discussion.

So basically the new Wiki was formed because the nazi-friendly admin of the original refused to do the CoC thing, and basically had control of the domain name and site, and has refused to take any of it down, which as I said is how I spend literally months getting good, up to date info from the real wiki, and stale shitty nazi info from the other, though I never noticed the woke invasion page and shit until I discovered this. It’s an act of overt nazi sabotage, and basically the project has not been able to have it taken down, it wasted days of my time (sure, I should have read better, but again, I had no idea there was a second doppleganger set of nazi docs and couldn’t conceive of such a thing being a thing…)

Basically it was a straight line from that realization to my ending up with Debian or FreeBSD back on all my machines. I’ll take their minor irritants over wasting weeks of my life because nazis gonna nazi. If a hard forked project emerges from this that maintains the non-nazi stance, I might bring it back into my toolset.

The thin ray of hope: I have long thought about learning LISP and Emacs, and as it happens, there is an alternate project called Guix, which implements the NixOS feature set, but instead of using the Nix project’s bespoke declarative language, uses LISP instead. I say thin ray of hope, because if NixOS had a serious advantage that made it “use NixOS or don’t bother at all,” it was the fact that nixpkgs (the subject of today’s events) basically had feature parity with Arch and Debian SID, the other rolling releases of note, but obviously enjoyed more stability and flexibility than either, once you got your head wrapped about their way of doing things.

Guix does not have that same churn by any stretch, but, would still offer all the wonderful features of NixOS if you are willing to do the work of setting up any packages yourself, that do not already exist, and that is not at all removed from my to do list. The technology is fundamentally great fuckin’ stuff. And it’s worth noting that (up till today, anyways…) you could take advantage of nixpkgs by adding nix (not NixOS, just Nix) as a supplemental package manager on Debian and other distros.

All in all, today is zero surprise, and offers hope for a genuine rebuild in a more stable and useful way, that could then be adopted by business and others as a reliable and very, very useful way of doing custom builds for extremely fiddly tasks, with insane levels of reproducibility and the freedom to constantly improve.