TheEntity

Looks like a boring update but being boring is kinda the thing I appreciate in GNOME. It’s all about expectations.

A mixture of NixOS and Debian, depending on the machine. NixOS is trivial to maintain and to keep predictable and tidy. When its weirdness is a problem, Debian is my answer. It doesn’t get more normal than Debian.

It doesn’t use the system libraries, unless the system in question is NixOS. It still provides its own dependencies. Arguably in a more elegant and less wasteful manner, but they are still distinct from the ones used by the rest of the system.

EDIT: typo

In terms of the memory usage, it’s a reasonable approach these days. It gets hairy when we consider security vulnerabilities. It’s far easier to patch one system-wide shared library than to hunt down every single application still bundling a vulnerable version.

You can already use Tesseract to run OCR on any image. It’s a matter of tying it together with a screenshot tool with cropping capabilities and it should be very easy to use.

There is no “best WM”, only “best WM for you”. If you’re deep enough into this rabbit hole to install an alternative WM, at this point you’re the best judge of what’s the best, really.

Maybe you’re right, the jump from pure GUI to the Windows CLI is probably a much bigger paradigm shift than between these two CLIs. I was mostly worried about OP getting discouraged from ever dabbling in CLI due to the Windows one being terrible.

The Windows command line is nothing like the Linux one. It’s much less pleasant to use too.

I’m aware but thank you. I’ve tried it before and didn’t like it. Maybe I’ll give it another shot, though I don’t see much benefit in tying my music player to Emacs.

I’m an Emacs graybeard, so complex keybindings don’t scare me. My problem with ncmpcpp is twofold:

1. It relies on MPD which is always a PITA to properly configure. Pulseaudio always managed to make it not work on a fresh system. Hopefully with Pipewire it’ll be better.
2. The config format make no sense whatsoever. Especially the one with keybindings. It’s so cryptic I just stopped trying to understand it. Again, I’m an Emacs graybeard, to stress it as a point of reference.

MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.

I wish. They are not even close.

I can see it working if one wants to customize the compilation flags of a few packages they have strong opinions on, but otherwise don’t care about the rest of the system. Sort of like the binary cache in NixOS, where by default you use the binary cache, but you can customize parts of your system triggering a source-based installation for that parts.

If someone claims to do it for “all the optimizations”, you can immediately assume they are full of shit. If anything, the true gain is the control over the features to compile or not compile into your packages.

Even back in the day when I still used Windows (and GUI almost exclusively) I browsed my filesystems like I’d use a terminal with tab-completion. I’d press the first few letters of the file/directory I was looking for and press enter, rinse and repeat. I knew my file organization by heart anyway. It’s only natural for me to drop the GUIs for such use cases.

Right, I didn’t consider SELinux, thanks for mentioning it.

Syncterm seems to be available in nixpkgs. It’s trivial to install Nix (the package manager, not NixOS the system) on top of any system you choose and then add one or two packages you need, in this case just Syncterm.

I’m pretty sure the same operation without Git (or another VCS) would be infinitely more troublesome, not less.

“Local” in this context means local to this whole machine. From the perspective of a single user, it’s system-wide. But then from the perspective of a sysadmin managing dozens of such systems, it’s local.

If they are internal and permanent (read: unlikely to be removed on a daily basis), I’d just mount them based on their purpose and not them being separate HDDs physically. If they are meant for logs, mount them at /var/log. If they are meant for your movies, /home/user/data is more than fine. In general FHS describes the directory hierarchy, not which parts of it are mountpoints and which are physically on the same media. Technically you’re fine having each and every directory on a separate HDD.