pukeko

11 months later …

NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp

NixOS on an M2 Air here. Works fine, other than the fingerprint reader.

The 2016-2017 MBP are unusually bad. Devices on either side of that? You're fine. But the 2016-2017 devices? No wifi (except in some extremely unusual cases) is the big problem. Even then, it amazes me how much does work, with zero configuration, with a simple graphical install. The problem with this vintage MBP isn't that it's hard to get running--it's that it's (almost) impossible, but the parts that aren't impossible are as smooth as they can be.

Yes, that's cold comfort. But I'm speaking from the POV of an owner of a 2017 MBP who desperately wanted to keep it going.

The coda to the story is that my wife used it for a while with her business but it fell victim to an absolutely bizarre heat issue where the heat sink vents hot air directly across the controller cable for the display, leading to inevitable failure. Again: not an issue on either side of this model year. It's sad because it could've served for another 4-5 years, making the initial purchase price substantially more tolerable.

And that's without counting the roll-your-own variants. uBlue has been a remarkable project.

My wife and I have a saying we find ourselves using far, FAR too often: “Conservatism lurks in the most unexpected places…”

Keeping in mind that “knowing and believing what they do” is itself a perilous notion because one of them might be a “Post-Madrid 1933 purple throated” Marxist while another might be a “Modernist new path” Marxist (I made those terms up). I mean I know “lol factions” is an old discussion with the farthest left, but they can’t even agree with each other.

Apple IIc > Windows 3.1 > Windows 95 > Windows 98 > Windows XP > Brief experiment with Ubuntu in the REALLY purple and brown era > OS X > Elementary > Fedora > Endeavour > Fedora > Silverblue > ublue > NixOS

(not counting numerous VMs with everything from Debian to Linux From Scratch)

I'm on a refurb M2 Air that I picked up from Apple for peanuts. It took me about 15m to get NixOS running on the thing, and it's going to last me for 10 years, if my old MBP is anything to go by.

Also, regardless of the hardware politics, I'm not sure I've been in awe of a project as much as I have the Asahi team. They're just doing so much so quickly and with such command of the subject ... and they're so young. It's a joy to watch them work.

Whenever this topic comes up, I find myself wondering what these folks do all day. Not in a Boomer "don't these people have jobs?!?" way, but more ... what is it like to be them? Do they just sit in front of the computer looking for conversations to disrupt? What is their daily existence? Because I find their volume and dedication to what they do fascinating. Cancerous and absurd, but also fascinating.

LOL yep. I'm deleting the parent.

Let’s see.

Bearnaise
Bechamel
Apple
Pesto
Ketchup
Sweet BBQ
Chimichurri
Gravy
Panang
Romesco
Tabasco
Mustard BBQ
Vinegar BBQ
Mustard
Mole
Garum

The scale admittedly ramps up exponentially at the end there.

Upvoting not because you agreed with me but because of the relief of discovering my flagrantly innocuous frustration might have a kernel of justification.