For those curious: Gothic 1.

I’ve never heard of it before and it doesn’t look like my type of game. Anyone played it?

What about Elisa? I was under the (potentially mistaken) assumption that Elisa was the successor of Amarok.

Redox-OS?

I am sorryI am sorryI am sorryI…

I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of Flatpak vs AppImage, because I don’t know enough about the particulars.

However, I think the “user choice” argument is often deployed in situations where it probably shouldn’t be.

For instance, in this case, it’s not the user’s choice at all, but a developer’s choice, as a normal user would not be packaging their own software. They would be merely downloading one of a number of options of precompiled packages. And this is the thrust of the argument. If we take the GitHub rant at face value, some developers seem to be distributing software using AppImage, to the exclusion of other options. And then listing ways in which this is problematic.

I, for one, would be rather annoyed if my only option were either AppImage or Flatpak, as I typically prefer use software packaged for my package manager. That is user choice, give me the option to package it myself; hopefully it’s already been done for me.

There are some good things to be said about trust and verification, and I’m generally receptive to those arguments way more than “user choice.”

Be careful, the small partitions might be UEFI partitions (/boot and /boot/efi) and are required for booting your computer.

Because the nix package manager places all system packages under /nix/store/uniquehash-packagename-version/

Where the unique hash is obtained via a Merkel tree of all the inputs. So in particular, binaries and libraries exist underneath those directories, not in the places you would expect from FHS.

In order to make the system actually work, environment variables are set up and executables are patched to refer to specific paths within the Nix Store.

Considering he seems to be under the impression that OCR still sucks enough that he printed his entire letter, he’s probably not aware of recent computer stuff , (or he just writes like he’s 11, I guess?)

It’s never really clear from this video what exactly is his use case though.

Yes, nominally, but there is a layer called XWayland to support backwards compatibility, so it’s not really a concern.

Use ffmeg, here’s how to do the image part: https://superuser.com/questions/1429256/producing-lossless-video-from-set-of-png-images-using-ffmpeg

To do the audio use the copy option. See here for an example usage: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21567029/ffmpeg-to-duplicate-an-audio-stream-and-encode-this-new-stream

Thanks, I wasn’t sure it worked in sh. I’ve been surprised a lot before by seemingly simple stuff like this.

If you need to pass flags you can use

flatpak run org.inkscape.Inkscape "$@"

To forward all of the arguments to the script. Note that this might be a bashism, so you might need to change your hash bang to /bin/bash as well. Double check though.

(An easy way to check if something is working as you assume is just prepend the line with echo.)

Nix is also working on reproducible builds. In fact, the minimal installation CD for NixOS last release was reproducible. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-reproducible-builds-minimal-installation-iso-successfully-independently-rebuilt/34756/

Put a shell script in your PATH named inkscape with the following content:

#!/bin/sh

flatpak run org.inkscape.Inkscape

Note that you can use a local folder in your home directory to house small executables and scripts like this, so you don’t have to touch your system config. I generally recommend using something like ~/.local/bin and add it to your PATH via your Shell’s RC file.

If the disc is corrupted it may be failing, recommending ddrescue over dd is probably a better call not knowing anything else about this situation. Essentially, no reason not to use it.

If “D” is physically on the same hard drive, then you’ll probably want to back it up before installing. Technically, you can manage to do it without screwing everything up, but I would not trust myself to. It’s always a good idea to have backups anyway.

Also, user files typically reside on C by default and it takes some effort to put them on a different drive. Things like Downloads, Documents, Pictures, etc. so it’s worth checking that before wiping as well.

Additionally, you’ll probably want to format your “D” drive to a Linux native filesystem (eventually, after you back it up, because formatting results in data loss). While Linux does support NTFS quite well, it’s not perfect, and your data would probably be safer on ext4 or f2fs (depending on if you have HDDs or SSDs) (or zfs or btrfs is you’re into COW filesystems).

In Linux, you have all of your files mounted to a single “drive” called /. Everything is below /, which is called the “root” of your filesystem.

Typically, user data is stored in “/home” and this resides in the same directory structure as the rest of your OS, but on most systems it’s on a different filesystem or even on a different drive entirely. This is because in Linux it is routine to put a “D” drive just in a folder. On my computer, I have several of these mount points defined, so the different types of data don’t get mixed around, and I don’t have to worry about downloading too much bullshit affecting my computer’s updates.

Hope this helps.

Just make sure you back up any important data before wiping your own hard drive. And yeah, Steam handles a lot of the weirdness of running windows only games pretty well automatically.

The single killer feature that convinced me to move to NixOS is the ability to very easily keep separate development environments separate. For instance, if you’re working on multiple dev projects that have different minimum requirements, and you want to ensure that (for instance) you don’t accidentally use features from after boost 1.61 for project A, because that’s the stated requirement, but you need features from boost 1.75 in project B.

In a normal distribution, in order to set up an environment that has the proper version for project A you’d need to set up a chroot, a virtual machine, a complicated set of environment variables in a bespoke script with custom installation paths that you need to set up manually and remember to source, or just install a newer version of boost and rely on continuous integration to catch it if you screw up.

In NixOS, you can set up different shells which all reference the exact correct version of the libraries required for every project, you can have them installed simultaneously and without conflicts, and there’s even a shell hooking program that will automatically load and unload this configuration when you change directories into and out of the project folder. It makes managing many different projects much easier. It’s like a better version of venv, but for everything.

You can always configure the garbage collection to reduce disk space usage, or manually run it.