It’s not that far-fetched, PDFs in my opinion are closer to vector graphics than to document formats like odt and docx. They have no understanding of format if not using advanced features, like a table in a PDF is just spaced text with lines between them, and text is just independently placed letters. In fact the space symbol doesn’t exist in most PDFs, it’s just that two letters were spaced further apart. So they basically are multiple canvases that are being painted on with letters, lines, fill areas and even bitmap graphics.

Modern PDF actually does further in the direction of a document format by providing the content in a structured way, mostly for accessibility, but also for making the format suitable for automatic processing the contained data.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening. There’s no hard requirement for cat to read everything straight into memory. It can send data once it’s available, and the receiving process can read it as fast as it wants. There are cases where this might be more clear: Let’s say you have a big video file that you want to convert to something that only supports like y4m input and is not in ffmpeg. A common way is something like ffmpeg -i infile -f yuv4mpegpipe - | encoder --y4m outfile - I’m pretty sure ffmpeg won’t read the whole infile into memory, nor will it store the whole y4m representation in memory. Instead, it will decode infile as necessary and push into the pipe at the speed the encoder can handle.

But yeah, I remember something about tar using libraries for compression being more efficient that piping its output to a compressor. So it’s still the better route, but probably not as much better as you think.

Then those containers or virtual machines should add this or create the home as needed.

systemd has its own containers, so this is the implementation of that requirement; “virtual machines” might use this exact binary to create home, among other directories like srv and what not. Someone at one point probably said “we always need to create these when spinning up systems, maybe systems can provide a mechanism to do that for us?” and then it was implemented.

Having/home listed as a tmp file on regular systems is problematic by the nature of what tmpfiles claims it does.

systemd-tmpfiles claims the following:

systemd-tmpfiles creates, deletes, and cleans up files and directories, using the configuration file format and location specified in tmpfiles.d(5). Historically, it was designed to manage volatile and temporary files, as the name suggests, but it provides generic file management functionality and can be used to manage any kind of files.

I rather think having a purge command was the issue here, at the very least it should print a big fat warning at what it does, better even list all affected files and directories. There’s no reason a normal user needs this and with the name of the binary, it’s totally misleading, which is an issue in these situations.

E.g. for quick provisioning of containers or virtual machines, this is also to make sure the required directories always exist. In a normal distribution, /home already exists, so systemd-tmpfiles does nothing, but there are cases where you want to setup a standard directory structure and this is a declarative alternative to scripts with a lot of mkdir, chmod and chown.

The name systemd-tmpfiles is kind of historic at this point, but wasn’t changed due to backwards compatibility and all.

This would be somewhat interesting if it wasn’t for the fact that most of the countries in BRICS had massive human rights issues themselves or weren’t otherwise problematic:

Brazil: massive problems under Bolsonaro, luckily he’s no longer president

Russia: was against Ukraine, Mafia gas station state, oppression of homosexuals. Assassinated Nationals on foreign soil.

India: Hindu ethnostate with a caste system, also assassinated Nationals on foreign soil.

China: destabilizing source that uses economic influence to sabotage Western ones through state-sponsored espionage and other measures. Oppression of religious groups (Uighur, abduction of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima…), massive surveillance of its own population…

South Africa: actually probably the best of the bunch since apartheid ended though definitely not without issues

If they want so much, they can have their own financial system, but no other country can be forced to participate. It’s just nose again to detract from their own crimes. Which is a shame because they’re important topics that are being hijacked by these assholes. Especially the point of “unilateral protectionist measures” by a group that China is a member of is morning but ridiculous.

less comes with all distributions I know

I know you’re joking anyways, but I always cringe when I see that. There’s no need to invoke su there. If you want a root shell, use sudo -s or sudo -i depending on what kind of shell you want.

I am currently running Jellyfin on Btrfs and there is quite a performance impact due to CoW. If 2 clients decide to browse the libraries, both clients grind to a near standstill with regards to being able to see things.

CoW is not recommended for databases, all DB servers advise for turning it off for the actual database. You’ll run into the same issue with a dedicated database if you leave CoW on I guess. You could also disable CoW for jellyfin’s database right now and performance should increase.

I also follow the progress of a dedicated DB, but on the other hand I don’t know how much sense it makes architecturally. The likeliness that you have multiple jellyfin server instances access the same database is low - after all, there is info very specific to the server in there like the file path. Just migration is already not easy, how likely is sharing the database live? And if each database is specific to an instance - why not use SQLite (like it’s done right now) and allow for more specific parameter tuning, like used memory and the like?

There’s a keepassxc-full package that comes with all the functionality. Anyhow, Debian does not have the concept of USE flags, these don’t make sense in a binary-based distribution.

NixOS: (1, 2) - You can define specific package versions but with the large repos I doubt there is much QA going on

It depends on the nixpkgs channel you use (I’m also using the term for flakes here, though technically these are then called inputs). The main channels, those being NixOS-stable whatever the current version is at the time and NixOS-unstable have a rather big set of packages that must be built successfully before users get updates, including the tests defined in the build system plus sometimes distribution-specific tests, though these are often rather simple, like start program and see if its port is open. Even more, when a library gets updated, all programs and other libraries depending on it get rebuilt as well, including all tests.

Now what if a package outside of that scope breaks? Most likely, your new configuration won’t build, so you’re stuck on an older but working configuration, or it does build, but something doesn’t work. But I’m the latter case, you can still choose to start the older working configuration.

Also the more complicated packages have very dedicated and capable maintainers from my experience, sure the smaller stuff is often updated mostly automatically with merge request created by bots and just the final merge approved by the maintainer, but the big infrastructure is usually tested quite well.

As a downside, this can sometimes lead to longer periods without updates when a lot of stuff has to get rebuilt and something doesn’t work (multiple days, but not weeks). You can then switch to another set in case the problematic packages don’t affect you, or just wait. However, saying there’s little QA is unfair, in fact from my experience there’s more QA in nixpkgs than in most distributions.

I don’t recommend NixOS to new users because it abstracts a lot of stuff away and makes use of mechanics that are helpful to understand first. But if you’re comfortable with Linux, NixOS is a great distribution that even on unstable works very well. Then again, it allows specific packages to depend on very specific versions of other packages, which is partially the reason you’d use a stable distribution.

I’m assuming its API was originally very friendly and unintrusive

Which would make sense - stuff like this automates content creation on your platform, which justifies pricing for advertisement (its main income). Basically bots but not really because they’re initiated by a human action.

I can’t tell if this is actual advice or irony

This is a fork or other form of replacement for nix as in the package manager. It does not replace NixOS, but can be used on NixOS and Darwin.

Even water can have harmful side effects - you can drown, or get bloated, or dilute your body’s store of catalysts, you can over-work your kidneys, etc. Granted, water has fewer side effects than most things you could put into your body:-).

Water however is something the body absolutely requires and if it’s fit for consumption (e.g. clean, not distilled, etc) has no downsides when consumed in the required amount. There’s no metric that gets better without drinking water compared to with. Also, the possibility of drowning in isn’t limited to water, but rather a property of all(?) liquids.

Alcohol can be used well though - e.g. half a serving not even every day has been shown to have fantastic benefits, especially when it is red wine and the recipient is male (though it is unclear whether that is any better than just red grapes, although even if not, the latter can get quite expensive). e.g. it can help to alleviate stress, and lowers blood pressure (ofc it can also raise stress if used improperly, e.g. if you combine drinking with driving).

I’m not aware of any such studies living up to current scientific standards, which is why the WHO now states that there’s no safe level for consumption. https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-safe-for-our-health note that this is mostly about cancer only, not the other detrimental effects:

there are no studies that would demonstrate that the potential beneficial effects of light and moderate drinking on cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes outweigh the cancer risk associated with these same levels of alcohol consumption for individual consumers.

For studies showing a positive effect, it has recently been claimed that there are issues with how the control group, consisting of people who don’t drink, is selected, which this quote on the article hints at:

“Potential protective effects of alcohol consumption, suggested by some studies, are tightly connected with the comparison groups chosen and the statistical methods used, and may not consider other relevant factors”

Because often, the group of non-drinkers contains ex-drinkers who stopped drinking because of the negative health impact from drinking. So you’re comparing a moderate to light drinker (selective from the first group) to the average of the second group, which is problematic because of the previously mentioned fact.

Escapism is part of the human nature, and so is the desire to do drugs, the latter not even exclusive to humans. Both are fine in moderation.

Again, idc about it very much, but shifting away all responsibility from the substance and by extension, the profiteers, towards the sometimes uneducated users is just wrong, and creates a stigma for those who are affected by a dependence on alcohol and its effects detrimental to health. A substance that can have these effects just be at least partially to blame.

Oh, there are definitely some things wrong with alcohol itself, as for basically any psychotropic substance. I can’t think of one with absolutely zero downsides.

I don’t want to say you should abstain from all substance, in fact I don’t either, though I don’t drink anymore. But current academic consensus is that alcohol is rather harmful compared to other substance (and, in fairness, less harmful than others) and not only is it problematic itself, but also our approach towards it as a society.

Saying there’s nothing wrong with it shifts blame to the affected individual. Meanwhile, companies are raking in billions from sales and not being held accountable for the damage they cause.

Yes! Apologies, didn’t proofread what my phone produced from swiping

NixOS has the best concept and even pioneered it, but whether its implementation and documentation is perfect is a topic for debate.

However, it’s been quite long since I had to fiddle with my config and as such, the downsides don’t really affect one on a daily basis. In fact, I recently reinstalled my machine to change the root filesystem and it was an absolute breeze. If not for secure boot, it would have been absolutely trivial, and with secure boot it was easy and convenient.

As such, I consider the pains an investment into system that runs much better down the road. Though I’d love it if these pains were reduced.

nixpkgs is holding out with it because it’s part of the current GNOME 46 draft pull request: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/282102

Though I agree it’d have made more sense to migrate to freerdp 3 earlier and have two versions available, like with pipewire.

There’s also a nix file in that discussion with a more recent version.

NixOS, did a ldd (which zstd) and then ldd on the reported libzstd file.

Not using a POSIX shell before people complain about syntax

Edit: if you look at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-unstable/pkgs/tools/compression/zstd/default.nix, you’ll see that buildInputs is not being set, which means it can’t link to anything except the standard libraries.

Maybe Debian’s goal is to make liblzma a dependency of everything possible? It wasn’t a standard dependency of OpenSSH either, but rather something they patched in. ;)