Some software is so complex and difficult that Debian does not maintain it on their own, and instead follows the upstream release cycle.

Browsers are one such example, and as you’ve discovered for me, Thunderbird is probably another.

Also, please do not recommend testing for daily usage. It does not receive critical security updates in a timely manner, including for things that would effect desktop users. Use stable, Sid, or another distro. Testing is for testing Debian ONLY, and by using Debian Testing, you are losing the advantage of immediate security fixes that come from literally any other distro.

On my samsung phone I can… for now.

Edit: oh, by android distributions I meant the varkous variants put on devices by manufacterers.

Custom roms probably wouldn’t have these restrictions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/termux/comments/1gks9mf/announcement_termux_broken_on_android_15_for/

https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/1go55ow/termux_is_now_officially_dead_for_oneplus_and/

Termux is broken on oneplus devices.

This means winlator, and other similar termux based projects will no longer work.

In addition to that, other Android distributions have also moved “child process limit” to developer options, which may forebode them removing it, and breaking termux entirely. This is pretty scary IMO.

Debian already has docker packaged. That’s more convenient.

Debian with the docker convenience script.

They seem to be moving away from this, and it’s not longer the first option on their install page

On their debian page

Use a convenience script. Only recommended for testing and development environments

Also, it should be noted about the first option they recommend, Docker Desktop, that Docker Desktop is proprietary.

I recommend just getting the docker.io and docker-compose from debian’s repositories.

Wish I could transcend into declarativity but the thread’s nix survivor ratio is grim

Yeah lol.

I will say, that for my server, I decided to use kubernetes + fluxcd for declaratively. My entire kubernetes “state” is declared in a git repo, and this is the popular, industry standard for things like this, called GitOps. It makes it very easy to add an app, since it’s just adding a folder + some new config files. And unlike Nix, Kubernetes and Flux are very well documented with much tooling as well. Nix doesn’t really have a working LSP or good code autocomplete, but with kubernetes, I can just start typing in a yaml file and then hit tab and it spits out the template for me. Code autocompletion with kubernetes feels much more similar to the tooling of other, more mature tooling

It’s not as declarative as nix though. There are things missing, like OCI containers could theoretically shift if you don’t rely on hashes and some other nitpicks. But declarativity is a spectrum, and I feel like, outside of scientific scenarios (think simulations where versioning, hardware, runtime etc being the same is very important), I think many non-nixos solutions are declarative enough.

Advice online seemed like i needed to basically create a nix flake for the app. I still havent gotten it installed because i have no idea what nix flakes are.

So, the problem is that flakes are technically an “experimental” feature, and thus are not allowed to be included as a primary solution in the official documentation. But, basically everybody uses flakes, so it leads to this crazy documentation split, and is a big part of why documentation on Nix is so part.

Some stuff can only be done with flakes, some stuff only with non-flakes and you have to figure out which is which on your own, while also dealing with the poor documentation for either.

The advice you received was wrong. You could also use a combination of a default.nix file and a shell.nix file to create a package and development environment for your app. But, the documentation is so poor that it’s unlikely you will learn this, and figuring out how to do this on your own, is again, a massive time sink.

So, I use Arch, but I don’t use the AUR at all. Instead, I use nixpkgs to get stuff (admittedly only like 3 packages) not in the Arch repos.

The main reason for this is the quality of AUR packages. Although I don’t really fear a malicious package, I do remember hearing about a package that moved a users /bin to /opt during the install phase.

Something like that is literally impossible with Nix, due to the way that applications aren’t really installed to the system. But, nixpkgs also requires some level of vetting the package quality, which is also nice.

I also use nix for managing all my development environments. For example, my blog github repo, has a few nix files at it’s root, and you should just be able to type nix-shell in folder, and then you will get an identical environment to me.

declarative rollbackable immutability sounds really freakin’ AWESOME

I have BTRFS snapshots set up, and with grub-btrfs, I can even boot from them and revert to an older kernel (my /boot is stored on BTRFS).

However, I have given up on NixOS, for many reasons. The documentation is very poor, and it’s more complexity than it’s worth, to make my whole OS reproducible, rather than just my development environments. In addition to that, their are also issues with running certain apps that expect to see a normal FIlesystem Hierarchy, which nix does not provide. Although you can work around this with stuff like steam-run or creating a fake FHS using nix, I would rather not play that game.

But, considering I installed some stuff in an Ubuntu 22 distrobox recently, because that was what VScode and Unity official provide repos for, maybe this doesn’t really matter. You can probably use distrobox on Nixos, but I’ve seen issues about GPU acceleration with distrobox (and other non-nix apps) as well.

EDIT: I lied, I use the chaotic aur for some things.

Yes. Firstly, it’s about release cycles. Centos Stream is a rolling release distro (although it rolls very, very slowly). But what this means, is that there isn’t a true guarantee of application/ABI/API compatibility between current versions of Centos Stream and future versions.

In constrast to this, Centos 8 and previous were complete clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which was a stable release distro. During the 10 year lifecycle of each RHEL release, there was a guarantee certain application/ABI/API compatibility not changing, which is what stability in the Linux/software world is defined as.

Centos 8 was a free alternative, for institutions unwilling, or unable to pay for RHEL stable releases. But, with the death of Centos, an alternative was needed. Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and Scientific Linux (designed for labs and universities), were rebuilds of RHEL. This meant that, they would take RHEL’s open source code, and recompile it and distribute it in a way that guaranteed application/ABI/API compatibility with RHEL, for the same lifecycle of a RHEL release.

So Alma Linux and Rocky Linux fill that gap… but recently, RHEL said that they are adjusting policies to make it much harder for people to make rebuilds (likely targeting Oracle Linux, which is a RHEL rebuild), but this change may affect Alma and Rocky as well.

Rocky said they were going to keep bug-for-bug compatibility, like they used to, but Alma says they are going to do something different. Although they still intend to be ABI compatible, Alma has decided to make some changes to the base system, such as reimplimenting and continuing to support things that Red Hat saw unfit to continue existing in RHEL. One example of this is SPICE, which is a graphics protocol used for low latency display of virtual machines. It had many usecases, and I am very excited to see it back in a distro in the Red Hat ecosystem.

I honestly don’t know how this could turn out.

It could be an amazing change that results in much more progress for hardware acceleration on guests of various types (since that is what vmware is good at) in kvm…

Or it could mean that they are dropping that feature from vmware altogether.

Regardless, I like this change because it means I would be able to run vmware machines and libvirt kvm machines at the same time, at least when I am forced to use vmware workstation.

I also dislike proprietary software in general, so I think less proprietary software and more FOSS is a good thing.

I found this: https://github.com/tenclass/mvisor-win-vgpu-driver

But it is for another foss kvm based hypervisor called mvisor.

I disagree, because they are not the same thing.

Immutable means read only root.

Atomic means that updates are done in a snapshotted manner somehow. It usually means that if an update fails, your system is not in a half working state, but instead will be reverted to the last working state, and that updates are all or nothing.

I create a btrfs snapshot before updates on my Arch Linux system. This is atomic, but not immutable.*

There is also “image based” which distros like ublue (immutable, atomic) are, but Nixos (also immutable and atomic) are not.

*only really before big updates tbh, but I know some people do configure snapshits before all updates.

Yeah. this was in high school, in my math class, and we were playing a math game.

The way it worked, was that every table was a team, and each team had a “castle” drawn up onto the whiteboard. A random spinner was used to determine a team, who would then solve a problem the teacher assigned. If you successfully solved the problem, you could draw an X on another teams castle. 3 X’s mean that you are out.

My team was out. But, since this was a class, we could still solve problems, and still draw X’s. Our table got selected to solve a problem, and I did successfully. I looked at the board, and realized that only two teams had a single X, every other team had either two or three. In other words, I could choose who won the game, even though I could not win.

So, I started trying to get bids. I tried to get real money, but someone tried to scam me with some “draw the X first” nonsense. But, the other team offered to pay me four of the school’s fake money, and I accepted that and allowed them to win.

I may not have won the game, but I certainly felt victorious that day.

Maybe Whisper? This github repo: https://github.com/linto-ai/whisper-timestamped

Says thay whispher can do timestamps on speech segments. However, I don’t know if that’s what you want, since whispher might only be able to do that if it is transcribing the actual audio, rather than editing another text file.

It’s not. Noncommercial limitatation makes it also not open source.

I also think they don’t allow forking.

As an alternative suggestion, consider using a linux laptop with a drawing tablet.

I use a wacom intuos s with bluetooth to takes notes on xournal++, although rnote should work as well.

Not infinite ram. I’d say double ram, plus there is a noticable, but quick delay when switching to an application that was compressed by ram. But it’s much, much faster than switching to an app that was swapped to disk.

Cachyos (arch based distro) does this hy default.

Stallman doesn’t seem to get that pedophilia is wrong because of the hierarchy of power, and the power imbalances between older/younger people, not because of some inherent wrongness about being attracted to a prepubescent person. This is shown by how he condemns some pedophilia, but is accepting of 12+/past puberty. (I despise this logic, because it would also make gay sex and sodomy wrong, as well).

I find this deeply ironic, because his primary issue with proprietary software is the way that it gives developers levels of power over users. From his article Why Open Source Misses the Point

But software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their freedom. What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then powerfulness means the chains are more constricting, and reliability that they are harder to remove.

You would expect someone who is so in tune with the hierarchies that appear with software developers, publishers, and users, to also see those same hierarchies echoed in relationships between people of vastly different ages, but instead, we get this. I’m extremely disappointed.

These failures to understand hierarchy and power, are exactly why Stallman shouldn’t be in a position of power. Leaders should continually prove that they understand hierarchy and the effects of their actions on those below them. Someone who doesn’t understand how their power could affect another, shouldn’t be a leader.

Winlator is really just termux + proot + box64 + wine wrapped in a neat UI (+ controller support). You can, and people have set this up manually before winlator came along. You’ll either need termux-x11 or vnc for the GUI.

Mobox is a similar project that does this automatically via a script… but I don’t see a license in their github repo, plus they require the proprietary input bridge for touch controls.

Termux recently got moved off of the play store (kinda), and is now only available on f-droid/github, because Google was further locking down what they allowed on their store.

And in addition to that, they recently added a restriction in later versions of Android: “Child process limit”. Although this limit used to not there, when enabled, it prevents users from truly running arbitrary linux programs, like via termux.

Although the child process limit can still be disabled in developer options, it doesn’t bode well for how flexible base android in the future will be, since many times corpos like Google move stuff into the “secret” options before eventually removing that dial all together.

TLDR: Termux has been, and is a thing… for now.

Also, I want to shout out winlator. It uses a linux proot, similator to termux, and has box64 and wine inside that proot that people can use to play games. I tested with Gungeon, and it even has controller support and performance, which is really impressive.