drndramrndra
My optimism ends at China being good for China. For the rest of us third worlders, they’re just the newest foreign exploiter (that might maybe turn good at some point).
For example the Export–Import Bank of China loves giving out loans with minimum spending oversight, at higher interest rates than the competition. Our politicians (organized criminals) take out a loan, and hire a Chinese company to build a highway. The Chinese company imports prisoners as free labor, and builds the highway for extravagant prices. Since they’re spending practically no money on the labor, as they don’t even have access to hot water for showering, I’m guessing the profits are split between the parties. All of those deals smell worse than Chinese prison camps in winter, and you can smell those long before you see them.
In the last 10 years the debt of my country to China has multiplied 12 times, and is now 2x the debt to the European Investment Bank. Xi and other high party officials are always happy with our deepening friendship and cooperation, and he even came to check stuff out before it really ramped up.
Meanwhile, literally every factory and project they’re involved in is an ecological disaster, surrounded by armed guards to prevent any journalist or NGO from peeking in. And when they for example manage to prove that a factory is releasing toxic sewage directly into a river that feeds a national reserve with endangered endemic species, our minister of ecology responds by essentially telling the assembled journalists to fuck off and mind their own business. The same factory was initially built by a couple hundred Vietnamese workers living in inhumane conditions, whose passports were taken away as soon as they entered the country. (more China fun times in the Balkans)
If you’re running unstable system packages, immutability won’t really save your stability.
So don’t complicate it, and just use Debian with nix and home-manager. That way you have a stable base, and you can create a list of bleeding edge packages that should be installed. In any case it should be essentially only docker + whatever can’t be dockerised.
I feel that they’re not close to the ideal system I have in my mind.
Check out something stable + nix. Just home-manager with a list of files to install, keep it simple. I’m currently running it with MX. I’d prefer guix, but nix is a lot better package wise. Guixos gave me too many headaches, for not enough benefits.
To truly appreciate lisp parens, use something like lispy or paredit. The uniformity of the language allows for some really cool editor utilities.
AFAIK no distro forces you to reboot, but they all require it for some updates to take effect. You can’t reload the kernel while the system is running.
Fedora just makes that clearer to the user by only installing those updates when they’re going to be active - after a reboot. I think it also blocks new system updates until the current set is completely finished.
You can disable offline updates in the system settings, but I think they’re a good idea, especially for the average user.
Sudo apt… is not the problem. Home-manager and a list of packages are so much better and easier to manage. That’s why I’m currently running nix on top of Debian.
The problems start when you want to modify something, or when you want to use tools that expect fhs complience. Then you run into a skill mountain and discover that the documentation is not great.
At least that’s my experience with guixos and nix. I haven’t tried nixos, and if I do, it’ll be only to generate docker images and such.
For a workstation, in most cases, there are simply not enough benefits to deal with the bs that comes with a declarative os.