For decades the UK was run by the sort of people who were totally A-OK with lots of stuff being ruled from Brussels, and who even wanted to accelerate that trend. Brexit took away the rule from Brussels and the constitutional crisis that saw 50+ MPs get kicked out of Parliament got rid of the most extreme elements of the Tory party at least, but neither suddenly replaced all the politicians and civil servants who never really wanted Brexit to happen and have no actual ideas for what to do with the new powers.
Getting rid of the stupid cookie banners may seem obvious, but there's a lot of obvious improvements that can be made like that. Sunak would rather host AI summits than actually make them, however.
That's kinda fair, but I think it's worth keeping an eye on.
Nix is really good at "programmatic environment for managing packages". Which is excellent for devops. There are advantages for developers, too.. but, developers can get away with quicker + dirtier solutions a lot of the time.
e.g. Maybe your project assumes a specific version of Ruby or whatever. Nix can solve this in a nice way, but you can use Ruby version manager (or the general asdf). Want to install Python packages, without conflicting? Nix can solve this in a nice way, but you can use virtualenv. Build a container image? etc.
An example of "practically useful, which Nix can do, others can't" I've seen is "just run the code from some repository". The non-Nix equivalent I've seen is `docker run <some image for a CLI tool>`. Nix allows the same UX, but without relying on containers. -- I think that's something everyone could benefit from.
I think the benefits for developers are definitely there; the main downside is that compared to those "quick + dirty" solutions, anything off the happy-path with Nix is quite difficult.
I can see how it would be a good system for ruby or python packages, or a docker replacement.
But it seems it isn't able to blindly mirror stuff from pip, for example? Or to just package any linux under the sun, like Docker can? You'd have to have a nix-specific version of every package you want to use.
And then, the first time you hit upon a package it doesn't have, you have to develop and maintain your own version of it (as far as I understand?). This sounds like a lot of work for someone who wants packages to just work, so they can focus on other things.
I remember using freebsd at some point. The annoyance of not being able to just grab a deb from random sites and install them far outweighted any benefits I got from a cleaner OS organization and some extra features. Nix feels the same way.
I am not saying nix is a bad idea or that it'd have no benefit. Just that, for non-enthusiasts and non-early adopters like myself, it's dead in the water until there is some major support behind it.
> Just that, for non-enthusiasts and non-early adopters like myself, it's dead in the water until there is some major support behind it.
Sure, this is pragmatic.
> But it seems it isn't able to blindly mirror stuff from pip, for example? Or to just package any linux under the sun, like Docker can? You'd have to have a nix-specific version of every package you want to use.
I think the effort of "I have to package this" varies from "automatable" to "PITA".
My experience has been that for writing package expressions for Python packages or Golang applications, it was more/less straightforward copy-pasting that required little Nix understanding. (The effort being: what are the sha256 sums, and what are the dependencies). -- I think to an extent this can even be done by "<lang>2nix".
An example of difficulty I've run into was trying to package a repo where I was unfamiliar with the language, and where build process assumed they could modify $HOME. I noticed that e.g. the anki package had to have a workaround anki-bin in order to get up-to-date versions because anki's build process changed.
If you want to deploy and configure something, nix does that exceptionally well.
If you want to install up to date software on Debian, RHEL, or other distribution but not negatively impact the system, nix does that exceptionally well.
If you want to build containers, nix does that decently.
Nix solves a lot of problems beyond reproducible environments. And it solves them permanently for nearly all use cases.
But it sounds like you have to get deep into this programming language, and figure it out yourself for the stuff that's not already there?
Containers and software installs etc. already have solutions that are much simpler to use. Don't require me to learn a new language or get into the weeds of how each package works.
I don't know anything about these two sides or what are their issues, but I can see this article has zero actual facts. Sounds like some low level buerocrat who is salty at not being appreciated by his boss.
Note that OpenGL rendering isn't enabled by default. If you've enabled it and it's slower I'd love to find out why, otherwise without it enabled the rendering hasn't changed.
> In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly).
They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else.
I bought a Sony smart TV about a year ago. I don't get ads per say, but there is a prominent area in the main menu where Sony wants to shill their services and that can't be turned off. Also, TV has to be restarted every week or two (it's android).
On the other hand, I love that I can easily cast screen from my laptop or photos from phone using built in chromecast.
I have a Sony too, and it’s a little too chatty for my liking.
I blocked port 53 unless it came from my own dns and added the below to my blocklist on a pihole.
It’s deeply imperfect but has blocked a lot of their crap. I had to whitelist one Netflix domain.
