If you really need Windows, then there is Windows 10/11 Internet of Things, Long Term Servicing Edition.

It’s Windows, for enterprises, without any of the bloat they force upon consumers normally.

It doesn’t even come with the Windows store, but that is trivial to reinstall, like only a single powershell command.

I’ve been watching this for a while now.

Most interesting is:

https://github.com/snowfallorg/nix-software-center , a GUI software center for nix

And https://github.com/snowfallorg/nixos-conf-editor , a GUI config editor for nix

Just like Eelco’s way of governing, it will likely have 0 effect on 99% of people using NixOS,

Flakes not being stabilized, or worked on by Eelco, despite him literally being the inventor absolutely has an effect on every single Nix user. The flakes-nonflakes aplit is part of why the documentation on nix is so poor. Some things only support one or the other, and it’s a pain.

The aux fork of nix (which idk what’s gonna happen to it) said they would stabilize the current implementation of flakes as v0. I hope this new council does the same, because it’s been far too long. So much of the community uses flakes that’s it’s basically official, but it being “experimental” means they can’t be mentioned in official docs, or included by default in the official installer. You have to edit a config file to enable flakes.

The worst part of this all, is that the Determinate Systems nix installer, only comes with flakes and no channels (old way) - and Eelco literally works for Determinate Systems. Despite all of this, flakes are still “experimental”.

I hope things change. Flakes are legitimately better, a minor addition in complexity, in exchange for making it easy to reuse code. And finally having unified documentation and tooling (if flakes become the main way) will probably be the best benefit.

I really hope this council moves flakes put of their “experimental” status. If so, then democracy has spoken: the users want flakes.

What stops companies from having a shell corporation use the code, and then that shell company rents “services” at a very low cost to a large corp?

I’m thinking something of the opposite if what Google does, where Alphabet (““located”” in Ireland) rents the Google logo to Google, allowing Google to say that their revenue is much less than it actually is.

EDIT: After some research, it seems that they stopped doing that: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/01/google-says-it-will-no-longer-use-double-irish-dutch-sandwich-tax-loophole

But a similar scheme being applied to this license does concern me.

The person telling you to “learn what AD is” is kinda a douche, but they aren’t wrong.

AD is mainly 3 components in one:

• Configuration management across a variety of machines
• Shared logins
• Shared user data across many machines

All of these are doable on Linux. In many ways. Many, many ways. That you have to set up yourself.

For configuration management, do you want ansible, puppet, chef, nix, etc?

For shared logins, do you want openldap, lldap, Red Hat’s ldap, etc?

For shared user data, do you want nfs, systemd-homed, or something else?

And for all of those, you have to evaluate, maybe test, and then select a solution, and then set it up yourself in a resilient manner.

Nixos, as a server distro, can host the relevant services needed for this. As a desktop distro, it can also do configuration management. But that’s missing the point of AD, in my opinion.

The point of AD, and how it managed to become so popular, is that it is all of those, in an all-in-one solution that is simple to use (joining Windows machines to a domain is trivial), and it also comes with paid support.

Even if you were to build your own alternative on Nixos, which would be a lot of tinkering and twiddling, then you would end up with some of the same core features, but you would have to maintain, secure, etc, it yourself, and not having to do those to such an extent is why people buy Active Directory. There would be no alternative to things like Group Policy, instead you would be writing your own nix code.

So yeah. Unless someone comes along and builds an all-in-one solution on top of Nixos, nixos isn’t really an alternative to active directory. You can replicate the core features. But it’s not an alternative.

I used to spend a ton of time helping people on reddit with linux and related things, and the “why” matters immensely in that case.

XY problem was extremely common, where someone was trying to achieve a goal through “incorrect” means.

I also saw many, many people’s issues where they wanted something, but were referring to it by a different name, ending up confused and lost. All I had to do was say “you actually want Y” and point them on their way, and they would be happy.

And then of course, sometimes people try to do something that’s simply not possible (or more usually, not implemented in software.).

But in general, it’s very difficult to help people who don’t make it easy for you to help them, and part of that is explaining the “why”, in addition to their issue.

I usually use nix to manage my development environments.

At the root of the git repo for my blog, there is a shell.nix file. This file, shell.nix, declares an entire shell environment, giving me tools, environment variables, and other things I need. I just run nix-shell while in the same directory as the shell.nix file, and it creates that shell environment.

There are other options, like VSCode has support for developing in a docker container (only docker, not podman or lxc).

I think lxc/incus (same thing) containers are kinda excessive for this case, because those containers are a full linux system, complete with an init system and whatnot. Such a thing is going to use more resources (ram, cpu, and storage space), and it’s also going to be more to manage compared to application containers (docker, podman), which are typically very stripped down and come with only what is needed to run the application.

I used to use anaconda, but switched away because it doesn’t have all the packages I wanted, and couldn’t control the versions of packages installed very well, whereas nix does these both very well. Anaconda is very similar in usage though, especially once you start setting up multiple virtual anaconda environments for separate projects. However, I don’t know if anaconda is as portable as nix is, able to create an entire environment from a single file of code.

Once federation gets added to one of the FOSS, self hosted alternatives, I’ll probably switch. I’ll mirror stuff to github probably, for resume/recruiter purposes, but the CI/CD, website deployment, and main development will happen on whatever alternative I chose.

This is about python packaging, like making/getting libraries/apps rather than compiling binaries, but it’s pretty relevant here:

https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2023/01/15/how-to-improve-python-packaging/