Nice writeup and a fun read! Never thought I would encounter a fellow NixOS and FoundryVTT user in the wild, but I realize the Venn diagram of these kinds of users do have more overlap than I thought.

With regards to your point about Foundry needing more power than a cheap VPS: I have it working fine on an Oracle cloud free tier VPS (unfortunately not the ARM-cores). That being said, it does want a little more power.

I am not running it with NixOS though. I am renting a temporary space, so I do not own or want to do too much locally right now, and Oracle OCI was only sort of working with NixOS. I did manage to install it with nixos-infect, but think I messed up the SSH with my reverse proxy and had no way to fall back to a previous version, which begs the question how would you?

You linked to “NixOS friendly hosters”, do those give you access to boot options to recover from such a case? Since I did not have that option I determined the risk of failure too great for setting up NixOS on that particular VPS provider.

I also note that you use the nix-foundryvtt module and was wondering how your experience with it was. Does your sops define your login to the website such that it fetches the package automatically or do you have to manually install them?

Glad to hear it!

I replaced a Realtek one because it constantly dropped connections. Luckily, this was one of the type of fixes that actually turned out to be easier than it looked.

I used Solus for years, it was actually my first long time Linux distro, and I have fond memories from that time and deep appreciation of the project. Note that I say used, because I have moved on (to EndeavourOS and later NixOS).

The reason why I moved on is the same as why I would recommend against Solus: the project have lost a lot of its core contributors. At the time I left there were no package updates for quite some time (used to be weekly).

I am not quite sure Solus really got a future. There are talks about converging it with AerynOS, former SerpentOS, which is innovative but still experimental software built by the original team, i.e. those that left Solus in the first place. Though they are really proficient in making the software, I do not think they have the same skillset for securing longevity through contributions.

In the end you should not care too much what people think. You will get the popular options for the intersection of Lemmy and Linux users, but popular is not always good nor what is right for you. Just try stuff and be ready to move a little through rigorous backups, you do have backups?

I use this to help my grandma remotely! The two steps needed were to join her into my Tailscale network and set up SSH with key authentication only.

Now I am able to SSH into her computer and enable VNC (remote control) and connect to the VNC-server over an SSH-tunnel like this.

Not on NixOS!

services.immich.enable = true;

Phoronix and Gamingonlinux are awesome!

Setup Mint for grandma, and had to do it again recently as she had bought a new computer and found Windows annoying and unintuitive.

R and the tidyverse? It can even generate SQL for you.

LunarVim is dead I think. In the issues section the (main?) dev says they recommend switching to something else and that they have gone over to Astronvim.

Looks like someone else opened an issue around three weeks ago.

Just FYI, I cannot see your pronouns in the Voyager app that I use on my phone.

NixOS and ext4 user here with no problems. Care to elaborate?

I detested differential equations. However, that was more due to how it was presented than the underlying, surprisingly, beautiful math.

The only problem with courses like calc 3 and differential equations (in my experience, as a mathematician) is that they are cheating somewhat. By cheating I mean relying on inadequate, flawed or entirely omitted proofs. How can the students truly understand something if they are not presented the whole story (or at least reference)?

The good thing about these courses are that there are usually no shortage of relevant exercises!

I obviously downloaded a car after seeing that obnoxious anti-piracy ad.

The EU requires government acquisitions to be publicly announced so that private companies can make offers that the government then must choose from (not freely, mind you, but following some “objective” metrics).

Even though this might sound great to some, it has the downside of promoting commercial services and vendor lock-in up to the point that even if a free and open source alternative exists, it cannot be used unless there also exists some commercial entity behind it that can sell the software and support for it in accordance with the established metrics.

This might be one of the biggest hurdles in the way for Linux adoption, since anyone can claim to do lots of great stuff with SUPERproprietarySOFTWARE^TM and then hold critical services, like healthcare mentioned elsewhere, hostage to their failure to deliver on promises and future bad support.

I can send you an ISO file with more Tux.

Thanks! As I have been learning to love the Nix way of doing things my only regret is missing the great documentation of Arch. Hopefully we can have the best of both worlds in the future!

They just started counting all my computers and virtual machines on which I run Arch and Nixos btw!