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It wasn't for nothing

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Re: It wasn't for nothing

#131

Post by rekado »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #92
nonrandomstring wrote: post #84

Read together, some comments seem to reveal the poles of a moral landscape in the hacker community: > Guix saved my life... finally feeling some stability in life; and a desire to explore other creative outlets such as blogging (hi!), cooking, growing sustainable foods; and healthy activities like climbing and skiing. None of this would be possible without Guix, > If Guix ever becomes mainstream, it will be in spite…

I do not at all resent the attitude. I resent that Guix is presented as a serious alternative to, say, Nix, within this community. I will be the first person to appreciate the efforts of folks working on Open and Free Software, it's really noble. The world would be a better place if all our software was Free, but that's not the world we live in today. I wish them all the luck and success in the world, but wanting ado…

re "guilting":

Even hard-core free software folks will not see the use of proprietary software as a moral failing, but rather as an injustice. Nobody should be shamed for using proprietary software. (I consider it morally wrong to write proprietary software, though.)

Even people like RMS have stated as much in the past. Ignore those who turn this free software stuff into some weird quest for moral purity. Nobody cares what software you use; they may pity you for being coerced into using proprietary software or they may judge you for writing proprietary software.

re serious alternative: Guix is a serious alternative to Nix. It is for me and the scientists I support, because when it comes to reproducible science there's arguably no better solution out there. With my sysadmin hat on: it's a serious alternative, because I'm using it on dozens of machines successfully. On machines that require non-free blobs it's also a valid choice because its design makes it trivial to install selected non-free software packages.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#132

Post by mbakke »

johnny22 wrote: post #11
behnamoh wrote: post #4

I liked the article, I wish there were more of these. I've always wondered "who" are the developers who contribute to the open-source projects that I use without much hassle? Why do they do it? How does their life look like? And most importantly, are they OK?

> And most importantly, are they OK? i wanna know this too!

Author here, I appreciate the concern!

Actually this blog [post] came about by stopping up and looking at my core values. Earlier this year I decided to quit alcohol for good and suddenly found myself struggling both socially and professionally. Now I'm slowly regaining control of my life and felt inspired to solidify my gratitude to the Guix community which played no small role.

So yes, I'm OK and getting better every day, thanks :-)

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#133

Post by KineticLensman »

ryandrake wrote: post #127
peterangular wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op - answering personally. The moment you have an audience for something it significantly changes the experience. Doesn't matter if it's music, development, cooking... if other humans are involved on the receiving end it makes it different. For a lot of us, we're very protective of our creative endeavors. And, lots of the time the journey we're taking is one of vulnerability (learning, creatively extending oursel…

> If/when this stuff I created dies with me that's OK. I'm a fart in the wind anyway, and I don't care about silly things like "legacy" - I just need to create stuff to optimize and improve the world around me. And, sometimes I create stuff just because it feels good. It's a selfish endeavor sure, but I'd have it no other way. I was going to reply but you summed it up nicely. I have been polishing away on a dozen or…

Same from a photography perspective. I take pictures because I enjoy the craft and results, not because I need other people to like them. Back in the day I had half a million views on Flickr; now the next only people who see my shots are people who commission me to take them

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#134

Post by mbakke »

e12e wrote: post #110
flobosg wrote: post #57

Great post. It reminded me a bit of this one from the creator of SerenityOS: https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-Ser...

So in a somewhat similar vein we have SerenityOS, GNU Guix and TempleOS (by the late Davis). Might be room for some research in this area?

This makes it sound like I'm the founder or main developer of Guix which is not at all the case.

I certainly would have been worse off mentally without Guix as a creative or "OCD" outlet however.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#135

Post by chrisweekly »

reilly3000 wrote: post #44

I really appreciate this post and how it highlights the power of becoming involved in occupation. I use that term in the context of the fact that my spouse is an Occupational Therapist by trade. In that field, the term occupation refers to a collection of activities of daily living, not a "job" per se. Rather than seeing patients through a framework of diagnosis or disability, they look at activities and people's abi…

Yes! See also the Japanese concept of "ikigai", which helps explain why many people's ideas equating traditional retirement with happiness are so misguided.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#136

Post by fezfight »

alphachloride wrote: post #51

https://guix.gnu.org/en/about/ > Guix is an advanced distribution of the GNU operating system developed by the GNU Project—which respects the freedom of computer users. For anyone looking for more context. I did not know anything about the what and why and who of this post. Having read it, I like the author's point of view. Working on it is good for his well-being. That's more than enough reason to pursue it.

Sounds like a rad hobby, to be honest. Good for the author and thanks to you for framing it like this.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#137

Post by marginalia_nu »

unixhero wrote: post #81

And let's all be honest here: There is nothing else to do in Norway unless you're a active sportsman during the 9 winter months. There are few parades Few social gatherings Little social cohesion No reason to seek up a public place to randomly meet people, because people shun random social contact There is only binge drinking and a social walking alone in the cities Same with Sweden and Finland. As opposed to living…

Dunno, I think you need to get a few hobbies if that's what you feel. Even though I haven't worked since may, I feel the day doesn't have nearly enough hours for me to do all the things I wish I could, living in Sweden.

I own a small library of books I don't have time to read, I have several spoken languages I want to learn, I'd like to spend more time learning calligraphy, I'd love to learn to play music, I don't have enough time to go to the gym as much as I want, I could do with more time to spend programming as well.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#138

Post by virchau13 »

flatbub wrote: post #31
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Guix introduces abstractions, such as operating-system that has defined fields that make it clearer what structures are being built. NixOS, on the other hand, does not have such abstractions (or perhaps just not as well documented/discoverable). NixOS had plenty of abstractions, so I don't quite understand this. All of NixOS is a compilation of abstractions for building an operating system environment. Could you el…

AFAICT, NixOS has no equivalent to the type https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/operating_002dsyste... , which makes it clear what an OS contains, and allows you to query the OS. Instead, NixOS has many options, whose only structure is that they form a tree. When trying to understand a host, it's unclear how to begin to analyze this tree: no option is at a higher level of abstraction than any other, or if it is,…

The type problem is starting to be solved by flakes; the equivalent to the type `operating-system` is the type `nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem`.

To analyze a NixOS system configuration, I look for all modifications to the `services` attr (representing all the services of the system, e.g. `services.mpd.dir = "~/Music"`). If I want to know even more I can look for all the `.enable` keys to see if any hardware/program/etc options have been enabled, and the sources are easy to read so I can open the corresponding module file in Nixpkgs if I want to know what a particular option does. The default NixOS machine does literally nothing so I don't have to worry about that.

Guix does look really cool, and I would try it if it had more support for nonfree software (I depend on some nonfree software in my day-to-day.)

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#139

Post by tetha »

reilly3000 wrote: post #44

I really appreciate this post and how it highlights the power of becoming involved in occupation. I use that term in the context of the fact that my spouse is an Occupational Therapist by trade. In that field, the term occupation refers to a collection of activities of daily living, not a "job" per se. Rather than seeing patients through a framework of diagnosis or disability, they look at activities and people's abi…

This reminds me of something someone told me about hobbies, and becoming good at something: If you want to become really good at something, find simple enjoyment in doing the thing, and not in other people or the results.

Like, don't become a metal bass player because you want to play in a band to perform at Wacken. That will fail and disappoint. Instead, find enjoyment in rhythm kicking people like a damn horse, or find enjoyment in how different rhythm structures can be, and sounds an instrument can make. For me, it's becoming really interesting to understand how different fundamental rhythms of different genres are.

Re: It wasn't for nothing

#140

Post by flatbub »

virchau13 wrote: post #138
flatbub wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, NixOS has no equivalent to the type https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/operating_002dsyste... , which makes it clear what an OS contains, and allows you to query the OS. Instead, NixOS has many options, whose only structure is that they form a tree. When trying to understand a host, it's unclear how to begin to analyze this tree: no option is at a higher level of abstraction than any other, or if it is,…

The type problem is starting to be solved by flakes; the equivalent to the type `operating-system` is the type `nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem`. To analyze a NixOS system configuration, I look for all modifications to the `services` attr (representing all the services of the system, e.g. `services.mpd.dir = "~/Music"`). If I want to know even more I can look for all the `.enable` keys to see if any hardware/program/etc opti…

Nice. I've migrated to flakes and much prefer it.

Flakes provides abstractions at a per-repo level.

Guix offers abstractions all the way down: an OS contains a bootloader, which is also its own type.

> The default NixOS machine does literally nothing so I don't have to worry about that.

The default NixOS machine chooses a bootloader, enables nscd, has default users, enable DHCP, ...

... and those are just the parts I was able to guess at, and then confirm by checking whether their 'enable' option defaulted to true.

It's unclear how to determine (from the source code) what a default machine does in NixOS.

It was only when I tried Guix that I had the visibility into what my machine was actually composed of.

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