featured [he/him]

Well there are compatibility layers but they aren’t perfect. I’ve tried nix-ld, nix-alien, and nix-autobahn and each does work but not necessarily in all cases. I found this to be most common with scripts.

For example, I tried to install the discord mod Vencord using these solutions, but even with the compatibility shell I could not get past the first prompt.

Another issue I had was network authentication. An organization I’m in has a secure network requiring a web portal to sign in, and it uses a python script to get hardware details and install a certificate. This does not work even with FHS compatibility layers. I manually installed all of the python packages it wanted, which got it to launch and immediately crash. On traditional distros, it just works

I’m rambling but yes these tools exist and they may make everything rosy for you, but be aware of their own limitations because they didn’t solve much for me

I wanted to love nixos but it has many shortcomings that aren’t immediately obvious but can really stump you. No FHS compatibility seems fine but certain programs require it and don’t have nix native workarounds. Additionally, the documentation is really not good. I used it for a while but it got in the way too much; now I use a fedora variant and use regular Nix for dev packages using nix-direnv. Gives me the nix features while also having a fully compliant and functional base system

This is accurate. Additionally, the WebKit rendering engine that they have to use is open source, so not too bad imo

I think you’re better off finding tools which work for your particular language, application, workflow etc. For me I use nix and direnv to create directory based declarative package sets that load upon cd’ing to a project’s folder. This allows me to have exact versions of the packages I need regardless of system packaging or versions used in other projects. Some people prefer spinning up containers for this role, often using tools like distrobox. If the language you’re working in has good version management tooling then you can also just use that

Mozilla.social no longer exists, Mozilla took it down

There is a Unity variant that’s still maintained

Random applications that use the play integrity API won’t work on any third party OSes or ROMs. For example I tried to install some Intuit app on my GOS Pixel a while back (credit karma I think?) and it didn’t work at all

Mostly LibreWolf, but I’ve been enjoying Zen Browser recently. It’s based on Firefox but with lots of cool extra functionality baked in. It is still in alpha though and I’ve experienced some bugs, including it crashing my whole system a couple of times, but it’s very promising

Recently, uBlue. It’s more a family of fedora atomic images but it has taken the pain out of immutability for me. I was using Fedora silver blue and later Sericea a while back, but installing codecs from RPMfusion on it never worked properly and my hw acceleration was always broken. I was on NixOS for a while but had sporadic problems that come with NixOS not using an FHS structure. But uBlue just works. Hardware acceleration works out of the box, and I can easily create custom images with BlueBuild. It’s a very nice ecosystem to create a stable, secure, complete base system. And I run nix on top of it for user packages and home-manager to get all the benefits of both worlds

Check out Wayblue, they make some custom universal blue images based off fedora silverblue which includes a hyprland image. I’m running a modified way blue image myself these days and loving it. Technically it’s a secureblue image based on a way blue image but yeah same difference

Was using NixOS but just could not deal with lack of FHS compatibility. Even the workarounds like nix-ld and nix-alien didn’t help with some key scripts I needed to run for secure network verification stuff. So I just migrated to this plus nix/home-manager for my application management

If it’s something that will be mostly interacted with over CLI then kebab case. If GUI then spaces

There is a fully Rust based Unix-like OS out there, it’s called Redox and it’s very cool

Have you tried yabai or amethyst? Both really solid macOS tilers

In other words use a UPS 👍

I’d recommend checking out Distrobox, which allows you to create containers of other Linux distros then export their applications as if they were native. Install a distrobox with one of the distros that this program works with, use the terminal to install the program within it, then if it isn’t immediately in your applications menu use the distrobox export feature to place it there.

You could also layer Nix onto your bazzite image and install it that way, but if you don’t know Nix it’ll be complicated

I’ve been into NixOS recently, not sure if I’m gonna stick with it long term but I’m trying to make it work. I love that it’s immutable while still allowing system packages, and declaratively configuring all of your common programs with home manager is super cool. Just have issues with scripts from the internet and trying to get nix-ld to cooperate

I started with TrueNAS and it works great. Either regular TrueNAS or TrueNAS scale will suit your needs well, the major difference being that Scale uses a Linux base instead of the FreeBSD of core

They’re agreeing with you…

I use libvirt to do all my kvm/qemu stuff on my server. Using cockpit-machines web UI as a frontend. On my workstation if I ever need a VM I usually turn to Gnome Boxes for simplicity

On the topic of struggling to connect to self hosted services without a VPS or domain: check out mesh VPNs like ZeroTier or Tailscale. I access all my internal services over Tailscale these days and it’s super simple