There are many distros for people who don't want to care - Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary OS, MX Linux, etc. I don't see how NixOS not being one of them is NixOS's problem.
> "I believe that the core idea of NixOS is fundamentally opposed to the idea of what the average person wants in their desktop."
What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows - not Linux and certainly not some obscure independent distro. And this is still not a problem of that distro or Linux.
> is NixOS's problem. [...] And this is still not the distro's problem.
It seems like the author is talking to people who might consider using NixOS for desktops, not towards NixOS itself. Unless I missed something in the article, the author is not saying this is a NixOS problem, but a "I made the wrong choice for me" problem, and now they're sharing the experience of reaching that conclusion.
Don't get me wrong, I (like many) have a love-hate relationship with NixOS, where I use it for all my servers both remote and at home, but my desktop/laptops remain on Arch Linux because I too don't fit it fitting for desktop usage. But I wouldn't argue against people who want to/not want to use it for desktop use, cool that it works or not for them.
> What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows
I think based on the context, the author is talking about the average developer really, not the typical end-user. They do say "someone who wants to use a computer like a regular person to do regular work" which might confuse people, but they really are talking about developers, as you can tell by the rest of the article.
According to the latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular..., which also is biased admittedly), it seems like for professional use, ~48% use Windows, ~32% macOS and 28% Ubuntu. ~17% also use WSL, which is basically Linux in Windows, so I guess you could say ~45% wants to (or at least, does) use Linux for work.
Seems not so clear cut as you seem to think it is.
> With that I mean, the only reason I use WSL is for running containers locally.
Yeah, you're probably not alone in using Linux specifically for containers since Windows cannot run them. Just like I'm probably not alone in using Windows solely for the purpose of running Ableton, as Linux cannot run it :)
You can run Ableton as a non Steam game on NixOS. It was a bit of a pain to install in Steam and then update path to correct proton version but it definitely works. There are probably are easier ways to run it without steam but that’s how I got it working.
> What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows - not Linux and certainly not some obscure independent distro. And this is still not a problem of that distro or Linux.
The average person doesn't even want Windows. They want to click a button and not be bothered with the implementation details.
That is why mobile/tablet is such a popular form of compute these days. People don't even have to learn the basics of interfacing with a file system most of the time. Want to look at pictures you've taken? You can be oblivious to the fact that your camera app puts picture files in a specific directory and embeds a date code in the file name, the photo viewer app takes care of that for you.
15 years ago almost everyone would recognize the name because of the popularity of the Iron Man movies.
10 years ago Jarvis became a part of Vision in Age of Ultron and effectively no longer exists in the MCU. A variety of new AI assistants with new names were made in later movies.
None of the new ones became as recognizable, and I guess Jarvis is also falling into obscurity.
Don't read too much into my only vague awareness (or person I responded to's unawareness) - I think I've seen one Iron Man film, or maybe only bits of it even. I'm just not into all that Marvel/DC/superhero stuff.
(And as a student I Saturday-jobbed at a cinema, so there's a certain era for which I've seen at the very least many odd scenes out of order for essentially all widely released films...)
I want the power of Nixos and not caring. I would like this experience both for the desktop and the server.
I said this one time on hacker news and a nixos fan told me that people like me should basically fuck off from the community because they don’t want people like me.
I used nixos for about a year for work so I definitely see the benefits of this but this ass hole attitude just made me sick of it. Like why can’t I have both? Is it impossible to have both? It may not exist yet but there’s a need here that would benefit everyone if it were filled.
Needless to say that thanks to that person I now really just dislike the nixos community. Rude and no flexibility in changing. Inevitably some guy might respond to this to apologize on behalf of the community and I appreciate that… but at the same time I think most members of the community truly have this attitude of keeping things hard and challenging on nixos and they don’t want things to change at all.
In addition to this.
Everything the guy mentioned that makes nixos hard for desktop can apply to servers as well. It’s not as if everything magically gets better.
The "beauty" of websites built solely with javascript.
As if they couldn't build an absolutely identical page with just HTML and CSS. But no, javascript is the way for them because it has way more tracking and fingerprinting abilities than plain HTML and CSS.
This thing, despite using "captcha" in its name, is not your typical captcha like hCaptcha or Google's one, because it uses a proof-of-work mechanism instead of writing answers in textboxes/clicking on images/other means of verification requiring user input.
AI bots can't solve proof-of-work challenges because browsers they use for scraping don't support features needed to solve them. This is highlighted by existence of other proof-of-work solutions designed to specifically filter out AI bots, like go-away[1] or Anubis[2].
And yes, they work - once GNOME deployed one of these proof-of-work challenges on their gitlab instance, traffic on it fell by 97%[3].
[3] - https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by...: "According to Bart Piotrowski, in around two hours and a half they received 81k total requests, and out of those only 3% passed Anubi's proof of work, hinting at 97% of the traffic being bots."
> AI bots can't solve proof-of-work challenges because browsers they use for scraping don't support features needed to solve them. This is highlighted by existence of other proof-of-work solutions designed to specifically filter out AI bots, like go-away[1] or Anubis[2].
Huh, they definitely can?
go-away and Anubis reduces the load on your servers as bot operators cannot just scrape N pages per second without any drawbacks. Instead it gets really expensive to make 1000s of requests, as they're all really slow.
But for a user who uses their own AI agent, that browses the web, things like anubis and go-away aren't meant to (nor does it) stop them from accessing the websites at all, it'll just be a tiny bit slower.
Those tools are meant to stop site-wide scraping, not individual automatic user-agents.
> "If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened."
People didn't need them 20 years ago, so why do they need them now?
> "They are all FREE too, mind you."
No proprietary software is free. You either pay with your money (you do this with games, for example), or you pay with your data (and this is what you do with Google). Sometimes with both (you do this with Microsoft).
If this is the price we'll pay to break up a monopoly, then be it. Maybe we don't need these services, and maybe people will finally learn to not be dependent on a single provider for everything they have on the Internet.
