I just about fell on my arse the first time I saw Saturn through my telescope, actually looking at it and seeing the rings. Rings, right around a planet, right there. I couldn't see a lot of of detail because it's a fairly small refractor but there it was, a planet with rings.
Rings. Right around a whole fucking planet. Right there for everyone with a couple of hundred quid's worth of glass and aluminium and a reasonable view of the night sky to see. Just, right there in the sky, bright and clear.
I know exactly what you mean. I saw it with a £40 amazon telescope.
You know that weird feeling when you, for whatever reason, take another route from somewhere you know well, find you've arrived at an unusual end of another place you know well. The moment of connection, realisation that these two places are linked in this way.
I felt that, but on a huge level seeing Saturn's rings for the first time. For years outerspace, without me realising, occupied a place in my encyclopedias, books, internet images from NASA. Maybe subconscious me didn't really 'believe' it was actually just above my head this whole time.
And if you're conflicted between thinking both this and "but go is nice and static and free of runtime", you can look at https://crystal-lang.org/ Ruby syntax with static compilation for your tools.
Definitly. I've been replacing some of my more janky & complex bash scripts with ruby and it becomes a lot cleaner imo. Also, I recently 'discovered' Pathname, it takes away a lot of the pain of dealing with files and directories in ruby and allows for pretty clean code imo.
I wholeheartedly agree, and I am a giant NixOS fan, BUT:
1. You need space for the Nix store, so it's not appropriate for every system (I like building small embedded appliances).
2. A six month release cycle can get a bit tiresome after a while. I know it's personal preference, but I wish it was a bit longer.
3. Or, in order to contribute to the project, you need to chase the dragon with the unstable channel.
4. Forcing all the system state through the funnel of a single config file is great, except that it doesn't cover home directories. I found that I ended up with a massive unmanaged blob of state in my home directory which I couldn't capture (I never tried out home-manager, maybe I should have).
This is not to detract from NixOS! NixOS is great, and I remain a massive fan :-). But on my personal systems I find myself using macOS and Debian these days. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Valid points. I definitely wouldn’t use NixOS on embedded. About contributing, You don’t really need to be on the unstable channel completely. I use a mix of stable and unstable packages. It’s not hard to do but it’s also not super intuitive either. And about home directories, I don’t use Home Manager either. I find that it introduced too much complexity and I don’t actually like it all that much. What I do is globally install all my packages and put configuration files in /etc. if the programs don’t have an /etc location to look for, I just create a symlink to config file in my home directory. That way all my config files are in my nixos-config repo.
I want to write a blog post about my way of setting up NixOS. There are many ways to go about it and I feel like mine prioritizes simplicity and doesn’t use complex Nix techniques, so it may be very helpful for beginners.
For 1., it's possible (easy even? I've never tried this in a cross-compiling situation) to build packages on one system and push them to another via SSH.
I suppose an upgrade would still result in two copies of everything, at least temporarily, but at least the target system doesn't need source code, compilers, etc.
