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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: January 29th, 2021

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  • I think NixOS is a superb choice if you have the time and energy to invest in it. I’m currently using Guix System (a GNU fork of Nix) and I’m very very happy with it. Previously I’ve been on openSUSE Tumbleweed because I thought the most important thing for me was btrfs with an easy snapshot system. But then, one day, when I was writing ansible playbooks to configure my OS I realized that what I care most about is declarative configurations. Now I’ve completely stopped using ansible for my laptop/desktop, and just rely upon native Guix configuration. I love it.

    I do still run MicroOS on all of my servers because it “just works” and I think transactional systems are great for servers. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about trying out NixOS/Guix System as my server OS of choice, but we’ll see how that goes.

    If you’re willing to put in the time, I think you’ll love NixOS.

    Edit: Nix/Guix are also transactional.





  • Much of it might be freely available data, but there’s a huge difference between you accessing a website for data and an LLM doing the same thing. We’ve had bots scraping websites since the 90’s, it’s not a new thing. And since scraping bots have existed we’ve developed a standard on the web to deal with it, called “robots.txt”. A text file telling bots what they are allowed to do on websites and how they should behave.

    LLM’s are notorious for disrespecting this, leading to situations where small companies and organisations will have their websites scraped so thoroughly and frequently that they can’t even stay online anymore, as well as skyrocketing their operational costs. In the last few years we’ve had to develop ways just to protect ourselves against this. See the “Anubis” project.

    Hence, it’s much more important that LLM’s follow the rules than you and me doing so on an individual level.

    It’s the difference between you killing a couple of bees in your home versus an industry specialising in exterminating bees at scale. The efficiency is a big factor.











  • I’ve been running my homelab on GMKTec something for around one and a half year now, with a bunch of HDD’s and an SSD connected via USB. The HDD enclosure is some cheap thing from Amazon, but I’ve never had a problem with it. Does the enclosure you’re trying to use have dedicated power? Or are you powering the SSD’s via the USB ports? That’s the only thing I can think of that would potentially be a problem.



  • Maybe because it’s not an obviously wanted feature? But I’m just guessing. You should request it and see what happens, maybe more people want it. I’ve never even thought about it, since in the case of Podman/docker it’s so “obvious” and easy to just mount network shares to the host first. And in the case of Kubernetes you can just mount NFS shares directly into pods.


  • Agreed, but not quite perfectly. I’ve been using Tumbleweed for years, but there are a few things to think about.

    Whereas I’ve very rarely experienced any problems, the package manager is slow compared to the likes of apt and dnf. The repos are large, but the mirrors haven’t always been the fastest for me.

    Also “community”. There are always people in OpenSUSE matrix/irc rooms etc, but they are a rather small bunch of people. OpenSUSE doesn’t have close to the community of, say, Ubuntu or Arch.



  • I definitely do not hate SELinux, I think it’s a great system. But my experience mostly (at home, anyway) comes from managing servers running Kubernetes clusters and, like, just using podman do deploy containers. In both these cases SELinux is a on “just works” basis, for the most part.

    Then in enterprise environment that doesn’t run everything on containers, you usually have a very standardized way of applying SELinux policies. At my last place of work we did it via a rather Ansible role. It was simple and easy.

    But I can imagine using SELinux at home, where you maybe don’t have these things, might be a rather “mysterious” experience. It’s not the most obvious system.

    But learning to write your own policies (even if just trough se2allow or whatever it’s called) does de-mystify SELinix pretty quick.