 Hey, everybody, welcome to Linuxcast. I'm your host Matt. I'm Tyler. Steve. And I'm Josh. All right. By the way, I don't know where we'll end up cutting this for editing, because I'm sure that I'll have to put that beginning there in. But it took us at least three tries to get started. So those of you who are watching live, you've had some entertainment. I'm glad for that. I've been trolled again this week. So you're going to have to put up with that. So we'll see how that goes. Anyways, welcome to the Linuxcast. This is the Linux show where we talk about Linux-y things, usually no absolutely no tangents, and no nuggies. Because these fuckers didn't even bring me any. I mean, seriously, if they're going to troll me with a word, they could have at least ordered me some bitches. All right, anyways. You've got to come to Ohio first. McDonald's has delivery. I'm not paying that doordash fee. Especially out here, man. It'd be fucking ridiculous. Anyways, this is going to be a horrible podcast, at least in terms of trolling Matt, because it's going to be, everyone in the chat is going like crazy on it. And then two of my fellow friends here who I thought were my friends, but apparently hate my guts. Anyways, welcome. So today we have a good topic for you. But before we jump into that, we're going to be talking about what we've done this weekend open source, as we usually do. So Tyler, you get to go first. What have you been up to this week? I did a video on Gentoo installing Arch, Gentoo, and then Fedora on the main PC. Then I did a live stream where Josh kindly gave me $100. So I would install OpenMandriva on my machine, which totally didn't go completely oddly weird, where it boots on every other system in my house, but it gives me a black screen on my desktop PC, tried everything. I mean, like different USB ports, different BIOS settings, tried everything, switching up, only using one monitor, two monitors, like I've tried everything. It don't boot on it. So now I did install or download a GNOME ISO for it, because maybe it's SDDM causing an issue. And I'll try that on it, but I also got to keep Fedora installed for a little while, just because I got to do some video editing and recording. And I got to record with Steve here soon. So kind of can't have another broken computer. He's been wanting to record me for two days, and we ain't been able to do it because my computer keep breaking. I mean, I could have done it on Fedora, but I figured I'd have it fixed by now. Nah. Well, I mean, the first time it was with the Wi-Fi, I couldn't figure out how to get the Wi-Fi to work. Turns out you just got to reboot it enough times, and then the Wi-Fi will just work. I don't know why. Thank you, Fedora. But yeah. Oh, buddy, I am so sorry. I am so sorry. Here's your lucky dude. There you go. Good boy. Good boy. So what have you boys come up to this week? All right. Steve, you next. What have you been up to? OK. Where should I start? I have been working with a few friends of mine on learning more about PKG builds, because it turns out that you can run scripts called install scripts dot install scripts via PKG build. I didn't know that. And you can run as many commands as you want within those. Anyway, so besides that, I was learning more batch scripting thanks to my good pal VLK on the server. He's been instrumental in the NVIDIA and Wayland script. We're optimizing it even more now. We're reintroducing the 470XX drivers for not. I wouldn't like to call those drivers legacy, although they are, but they're not old enough to be considered as legacy. There are 600 series and stuff. They're not really legacy. It's just they're old. So we're reintroducing those and no more TKG. I'm just using the ones being maintained on the AUR because they get updated faster than the TKG ones. I've been talking to TKG on the back burner and cleaning up some packages from the packages file in all the ISOs because apparently the latest ISO felt like bloated because too many applications started showing in the app menu. So people want less packages. So I will try to minimize as much as I can because dependencies and we're adding. I'm adding more support for joysticks and joypads and like the PlayStation 5 controller and stuff for gamers who like to use those kind of controllers and for the window managers because guess what? There's a few users out there who install Hyperland on Xero Linux because apparently since you have KDE you can install Hyperland on Xero Linux pretty easily just a couple of packages and you're up and running. So for those people I will be including something called X remap KDE. X remap basically allows you to remap your, if you have key broken keys or you can create override or add more key bindings that don't already exist in the system and it gives you more granularity over your key bindings and shortcuts. And I'm learning more also about global shortcuts because apparently I'm late to the game. I saw a new setting in the KDE settings that I've never seen before since I don't use Wayland all that much. To me it was new but apparently it has existed since 527 for global shortcuts. And to me that meant that the KDE people are taking into consideration the people who keep complaining about keyboard shortcuts not working outside applications and stuff like that. So I'm learning more about that because I'm currently on Wayland and I have been using Wayland for the past three days on KDE. I've been using it for three months on my laptop on Nome but on KDE that's the longest I've been on Wayland and so far, absolutely zero issues. Josh, what you been up to? Well, since I read this comment showing up on Zany's channel here where he challenged me to use either Void Linux or NixOS for a whole year. I've installed Void Linux and I've already fixed three packages and I'm now currently working on getting something submitted upstream to Void Linux to fix all my issues with Void Linux. And you broke Lutris from what I saw? I didn't break Lutris, I broke the PR that I pushed because I didn't amend my last commit. Instead when I pushed the commit it updated not just one package because according to the Git repository you're only supposed to update one package at a time per PR and I turned that PR from one package into 17 packages by accident. Oh boy. Okay, you're gonna get banned soon? Not yet. Okay, eventually. I closed the PR. All right, so I have been gaming like crazy this week so I've been delving into some retro games. I've been playing some Pokemon. I played some cities. I also got into some regular gaming so a few weeks ago when Cities Skylines 2 came out I bought that and I've been playing that. It's been really good on Linux guys. They're like super stable, like crazy. Way better than the native Linux port was for CS1 just way beyond. So that's been basically what I've been doing and I played some Hearthstone. So I've been gaming when I say I'm not a gamer this last week and a half or so. It's been kind of nuts. I'm gonna, I haven't. Playing some Hearthstone? I might actually need to join you for some Hearthstone, man. You gotta be honest. It's a good game. Anyways, I also, I've been looking into figuring out how to do some retro gaming on the Steam Deck because I've been, I played. I can teach you. I can teach you, come to me, baby. Retro, yeah. I can teach you. See, everyone has a different recommendation over what you should use. So I'm gonna go with several other people. Battlesera. Battlesera for the win. Stop interrupting me, Steve. Retro gaming Battlesera, okay, sorry. All right, let's go ahead and jump into the main topic. So today was a topic that has been a long time coming because Josh didn't show up for the first week and then we took a wake off and did something else. Anyways, we're gonna be talking about NixOS and it's seeing us how it's Josh's topic. Josh, take us away. Oh, yeah. Steve was, everybody has impressed with NixOS as everybody else's in the world. My question is, is NixOS actually over-hyped? Okay, do I have to go first? I'll go first. Okay, so I don't think that it, NixOS is kind of like ArchLink was when ArchLink was hard to install. People like to talk about it because it's different. You know what I mean? It's something that gets installed in the regular way now. Like it didn't used to be but now you can just use Calamari's installer but because it does so many things in a different way people find that impressive about themselves. They manage their entire distro through a configuration file that there's not any other distribution out there that really does it that way. Well, I mean probably Geeks and, right? Does Geeks do it through a config file? Geeks and Nix are really about the only ones that have declarative configuration unless you wanna talk about like the really fancy ansible scripts. Okay, so I mean there's not many distributions out there that are like that. So because it's so different and does things in such a different way, I think people like to talk about it and think of themselves as doing something different than everybody who's just using a regular Linux distribution. I think that's the reason why people talk about it so much. I've been using it now on hardware for well over a month and I have to say I'm not gonna give away my review or anything but it's fine. It's fine. The documentation by the way is utter fucking garbage. Like total garbage but other than that it's fine. But I mean for NixOS and Nix has a package manager, I think they are overhyped in the sense that they are. A lot of people say that you should just start using them and it's great for any use case and it probably does work for any use case. Cause I mean as long as you can get a working Nix system and manage it, it's not really that hard to do. The only problem is it's not really mint for a lot of use cases. Like a lot of people aren't actually developing software with their system and that's where NixOS shines. Like also a lot of people don't really have multiple machines. So there's like a lot of people that could use Nix but probably don't really have a lot of good benefits for them like or benefits for them. They just won't get a lot of the really nice things about Nix that they use a lot. Like they'll just be using it for the sake of using it. Which is not a bad idea. I mean, I'm not ever gonna say Nix is a bad idea for just learning it because there are, because the documentation is crap, you can find great high paying jobs. If you know how to use Nix in and out that that can get you a job. So that is something that you do have to give to Nix. Like sure, documentation may be crap but that shit could lend you a job and that would be nice. I think everyone could like just getting a job from knowing their favorite Linux distro. That's pretty cool. So the only reason NixOS gets bad rap sometimes is because users are trying to use it for the wrong purpose. They wanna use it as a regular desktop, I mean a regular distro for daily use. When it's primary target is not those kind of people. I mean, it can be used for daily use, but just not. It can be by knowledgeable people, not by some John Doe who just came from Mac or Windows. It's got a learning curve. It's just like you said, like Arch in the early days where it required a lot of learning curve to get it installed in the first place. But NixOS still has that because it still didn't flutter from its philosophy of being a more advanced kind of distro. Whereas Arch on the other hand, they're doing their best to make it easier and easier and easier. And now with Arch install, it just takes minutes instead of having to read the wiki over and over and over again to get it through your skull how to configure Wi-Fi, so. Well, I think NixOS is getting better there. Their documentation is continuously getting better. Well, also they have a Calamari's installer version, which makes it easier to install. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, for NixOS, you can't just, I mean, the main one that they recommend is their one that just comes with GNOME. And so if you boot it up, you are gonna get a working GNOME environment. So like for most people, that's fine too. Well, I mean, they offer both, but their recommended one is GNOME. So I think that's the one that they actually like. And I, listen, to be honest, if a distro wants to position itself as a stable or not stable as a usable distro, GNOME is the desktop environment to ship with. Like Workstation. And I get why a lot of distros ship their flagship with GNOME, it's because GNOME is just much easier to understand out of the box versus KDE where you have to hunt for the settings and. Well, I think it's just more stable. That's the main one. More stable, yeah. And I'm using, listen, I've been using it for the past three, four months on my laptop. And I am more productive on GNOME because GNOME stays out of my way. Let's pull this back away from the whole GNOME versus KDE stuff, because that's not the topic. I know it's not the topic. I'm just saying that the NixOS choosing GNOME is a good idea as their flagship. Every distro chooses GNOME, basically. So I have thoughts about NixOS as well. And I just figured I'd raise up my thoughts last and let you guys talk first, because I actually do see a legitimate use case for NixOS. And I can also see where it does deserve some of the praise that it does get. Because the big benefit of NixOS is the declarative configuration. And okay, so what I've got right here is my NixOS configuration. This is an Etsy slash NixOS. This is my configuration.Nix. This is off of a freshly installed virtual machine using just normal BIOS boot. So you can see where I'm declaring my bootloader configurations. I'm declaring my time zone, my key map, basically all the things that you would typically set yourself. But the big benefit of this is that, let's see if I can find it, I can declare users right here, along with user defined packages in just this one file. And I can already, and I can configure groups, I can configure permissions and everything with just a single file. That is the big benefit to NixOS. Now, this means that NixOS as a whole can actually have a very specific use case in the cloud market itself. Not necessarily like the user desktop market, but that cloud managed for any cloud system administrators that they're messing around with Docker containers and such like that, you can declare Docker containers in the Nix configuration as well. So if you're not wanting to invest in Ansible knowledge, but you can use NixOS as well. In fact, you can actually use Ansible to deploy NixOS if you really want. But it gives you, and what this configuration file allows is a completely reproducible system. Now, where NixOS falls short is of course documentation. The NixOS user manual for like getting the system installed, fantastic, until you get to the very bottom of the manual, where it basically tells you that at this point, we don't know where to go from here. So if you want to figure out how to do something on NixOS, you need to look at this file over here and basically reverse engineer the package and figure it out for yourself. The creators of NixOS do that in the documentation. It basically used to say that. I don't know if it still says it anymore, but anyways, that's where it falls short. And then the community comes in, they come out with projects such as Flakes and Home Manager and Flakes, nobody can really explain them, not properly, but think of Flakes more similar to like a very specified version of Nix's variant of the AUR and that sort of explains Flakes to you. For Home Manager, it's basically configuration.Nix for a user profile. It's really just a way to manage the home directory. You can package up like all of your music files, your video files, your documents folder and everything right there. And it basically expands the reproducibility from the core system down to user profile at the same time. So yes, Steve, you can make a zero Linux Nix edition if you really want. Way to go to, way to go to stab me in the heart. You're welcome. Well, I think NixOS is definitely going to be something that like lives on for quite a while because it is one of those things where the people who do really use it day in and day out will love it like it's kind of like the Void gang, you know? Like Void is not a, yeah, Void's not popular, but like the people who are in it are in literally a gang. Like they die for each other. Like if you start an argument as one Void user, there will be six others that will die on that hill with you. Like they will battle to the end with you. Void has a very strong tight knit community and so does Nix. Like I think that's also a good argument for getting into Nix, even though the documentation may be crap, there is plenty of Nix users that I've seen personally offer their day to me to help me do something with Nix or help me use Nix, install it. Like there's plenty of people that will help you. The package manager is kind of useful. I know you can use it anywhere and everywhere. That's what Valve is considering adding in the future releases of Steam OS or whatever if it ever comes out. But the package manager, at first, like I was telling Tyler earlier before we came on, at first I couldn't understand what the heck it was doing, why it was pulling like a million files, but after he explained it to me, I see a very good use for it, especially for people on a connection like mine. It's very useful to use a distro that has a package manager that does things the way Nix does. It pulls smaller files and it puts them in a tempfs and then moves them to their correct location. And the ability to have multiple versions of a package is very useful, especially for developers, as Tyler was telling me. And I could see that, especially for me who maintains packages for XeroLinux. It allows me to see if I should hold back a package or not. We're trying to move away from holding back packages, but if we have to, we have a place to put them and this type of methodology or philosophy would work better. So I'm starting to, and you can sorta kinda do that with Python these days, but Dix does it way better. So it's way beneficial, more beneficial to use a distro like that. I know this is a benefit, but this is as far as I can talk about Nix because it booked itself in my VM and then I had to remove it. Yeah, so just for the chat here, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna post a link to a Git repository. This is a Nix config that I came up with several months ago, but when I attempted to daily drive NixOS myself, I did drop it. But I am curious if there's a NixOS user that might be listening to this podcast. You know, just send an email into the show with a link to your Nix configuration because I'm personally actually kind of curious on what other people are doing with this. Yeah, that would be really cool if people started sharing their NixOS configs. Here's my question for you guys. We have two or three different kind of ways that they're thinking about doing immutable distros these days. So we have the silver blue kind of way of doing things. You have the Nix way of doing things, you know, and then we have the kind of the blended ways of doing things kind of do a bit of both. Do you guys think that one way is better than the other? So this is where I come in and say that NixOS shouldn't even be included in that conversation because the only thing immutable about Nix is that yes, the root file system is read only. That's for good reason because, you know, you shouldn't be mess around the root file system. You should be managing the configuration file. But that doesn't mean that NixOS is immutable because you can totally change it if you really want. Well, okay, so I understand what you're coming from there, Josh, but the developers themselves call it an immutable distro. I'm sure that they call it. I'm just saying that they shouldn't be included in that conversation. Okay, let's include them in the conversation anyways, just for shits and giggles. Let's just say that the developers know what they're talking about and that they think that it's an immutable distro. Do you think that there's one way of doing this over the other that is better? Because guys, Silverblue is fairly new. Obviously, the open Suiza, Micro-West or whatever they call it, Aeon or whatever it's called now is fairly new. You've got all the new kids on the blocks, like Blend and Vanilla or whatever, all the new immutable distros that's been around for just a couple of years. But NixOS has been around for 20 years. It's been around for a very long time. So it feels like if this was the way that Linux was going to go that more distros would be emulating it. Well, I don't know. Because even if we don't go, like I know a lot of people do like immutable distros and there's plenty of people that aren't using them but are interested in them. But there's also a lot of people that just don't want to use an immutable distro. So to me, I think it really doesn't matter which way the majority of Linux systems go because there will always be choice between the two. I think the important part is that we have stuff like Nix or these kind of like universal package managers available that are actually like continuously developed and improved upon. So you can have any type of Linux system that you want whether it be immutable or otherwise and still have the access to the same packages on all of them. I think that the more idea between, let's ignore the technicalities behind the how the file systems work and the right ability and stuff. I know technically that's what immutable is all about but I think more what people think about when they think of immutable distros at least I do is the ability to move forward and back. So like in Nix you have the generations, right? So every time you run, switch, you go to forward and back generations and it allows you to take your system either towards which you're the president or back towards, let's say you install GNOME first and then KDE could go back to just to GNOME, same thing like that. And then you can do something similar but it's done completely differently on like silver blue, silver blue and all the others, they use a combination of like ButterFS snapshots and stuff like that in order to get that stuff done whereas NixOS doesn't use ButterFS at all. They do the generations in a completely different way and it's all based on that configuration file, right? So it just feels like they're doing things completely different but you guys said something earlier that just kind of just to bring it back to the main conversation. I think it was you Tyler said something about like fantastic for you and Steve, this is fantastic for developers, right? And over the course of the time that I've been using it the more I realized that this really is the distribution that would be great for developers but it's not the only one, right? Obviously developers can use whatever distribution they want but they have so many tools, it feels like they've developed this for developers and because they've created a way to create virtual environments that run their own client, their own shell and everything together so they can basically have a whole Nix shell right there so you can use it and keep things contained that way. Obviously they have the generations and stuff like that and you have all this stuff that is very focused on developing applications and creating containers and stuff like that. So it feels like it was very much designed and developed for people who are developing software which leads me to the question, why do you guys think so many normies are using it? Because there are a lot of people especially this is going on to people in my Discord who use it who are definitely not developers. The same reason so many people use Arch Linux because content creators, yeah, because content creators have praised NixOS. Yeah. That's the wrong thing that's happening. This is something wrong that's happening in the content creation world where a lot of them, they say they keep portraying NixOS in the wrong way. Well, I don't even know that it's that because I think it's a lot of, so because of the lack of good documentation and people being very familiar with their being really good tutorials and that type of content on YouTube, Nix content, if you do a tutorial or that kind of stuff about Nix, it does extraordinarily well on YouTube. So I think a lot of people are getting into Nix knowing that it's something, like as long as they can get into it and understand it, there's multiple different avenues for them to benefit from that knowledge. And I'm not saying like that's a bad thing at all. I think that's a good thing. But I think that's what causes a lot of people to start using Nix who wouldn't otherwise even be interested in any of the benefits that Nix offers. But I mean, still, nevertheless, those people who wouldn't end up getting into development related stuff, most likely when Nix are going to be exposed to developers. So I don't know, Nix could be a really good way of onboarding young developers into Linux and everything else. That was awesome of you, Ty, because I'm not used to listening to you saying words of wisdom. There you go. But everything you said is true. Because of the documentation is lacking, sometimes the videos kind of are used kind of in a way to complete or reorganize that documentation because the users, the content creators making the videos are helping NixOS documentation get better. Yeah, that is true. But like Alex said in the chat, Mike Kuya, Alex said in the chat, mostly the top reason why people, normies try to use Nix is to belong because they wanted this feeling of belonging to the elite. It's kind of like using NixOS, it's kind of like, hey, I'm part of the elite. Yeah, I mean, there is that aspect, but there is that aspect with every distro. This is one of the highest aspects these days. Well, I don't know, because a lot of, I mean, the belonging thing is true, but I think with NixOS, I mean, as we all know, NixOS has a very tight-knit community and it is a pretty, it's a really good group to belong to. It doesn't even come from an elite thing. The feeling of belonging to any group is nice. Like, I chose ARCH for XeroLinux because I wanted to feel in a way, not directly, indirectly, I wanted to feel like I was part of the elite. I'm using something that is not used by the masses because of its complexity. And when I found that Eric Dubois made it so simple using his ALCI script, I was like, it was presented to be on a silver platter, but I quickly found out that it wasn't as easy as it was portrayed to be. Well, that's the problem with wanting to feel superior than everybody with any Linux distro. Someone's going to script all of the complex things and if it hasn't already been done in two months. Yeah, it will make it look something that appear like something that is not. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Like, right now, the reason that there are enterprise jobs for NixOS is the actual, like, you know, very talented people already there can't get past the documentation and also have other things to do where they literally can't put in hours trying to figure out the right method to get something to work or like they don't have time for learning and like filling in holes in the documentation, stuff like that. So if you're already familiar with Nix, you already know how to do stuff, then that can benefit a company. So, but again, it's not like there's a lot of companies hiring for NixOS developers, but. It just feels so weird that a distribution that is solely managed through a terminal and or a configuration file, I suppose you could use as a regular text editor, but whatever, you still have to run commands in the terminal order to get that to go forth. So it feels weird that so many normal people who would normally be on the side of doing everything in a GUI are looking towards NixOS to be their distribution. And it makes me wonder, besides the whole being part of the club thing, what features they find once they're there that keep them there? Cause usually when like every Linux nerd who decides that they're going to invest themselves in Linux at one point or another, installs Gentoo, right? But only a select few actually find Gentoo useful and good and awesome, you know? And they continued using it, right? I'm sorry. No, there's nothing wrong with it. Use flags on Gentoo is probably one of those is one of those key Linux features that just isn't available on the vast majority of Linux distros out there and it makes it awesome, right? There's a reason why, like someone who says I use Gentoo, I can understand why that person uses Gentoo because of use flags and the ability to fully control all of your packages and all that stuff, right? When someone says, I use NixOS unless they're a developer, I have to question, what do you find good about it, right? What has drawn, not really what drew you there because maybe you're there because your friends are all there and it's whatever, but what keeps you there? Could you hold on a second Steve? Usually when someone gets on a distribution, the reason why they stay is because they've found features that they enjoy. Like what part of the NixOS experience for the normal people? I'll tell you one major one. One of my friends told me that a while ago like you said, it's the total control over the system, kind of like Gentoo and the fact that they can, it ties in with DT's reason for using app images is like they can keep multiple versions of any application that they are using. In case they wanna go back to a version because of one feature works on the older version and there's another feature that doesn't exist in the older version exists on the newer version, they keep a switching back and forth. Is that a normal person in the new space? That's one of the reasons that's what one friend of mine told me. Other than that, I don't know. I think a big aspect that draws people there and keeps them there is if you wanna do something different that a lot of people aren't doing, Nix covers that, then there's also the aspect of, well, okay, so I wanna do something custom. I wanna make it cool. The one worry that a lot of people have is, I'm gonna have to do this over and over again and I'm not really interested in doing that. So Nix covers you there. You set up one configuration file, you can do something custom and that's all you need and that's it. So for someone who wants to do something cool, they've got a free week to mess around with their computer, NixOS is a really good way of doing something different, cool and interesting and once you're done with that configuration, you're done. You don't have to go back. You're not gonna get an update that borks it. Theoretically, should, never happen. Nothing's perfect. It's actually a lot harder to break NixOS than it is to even break Silver Blue. I've tried. The only thing that I've found that reliably breaks NixOS is corrupting the file's list of itself. Well, yeah, that's a good way of going about breaking anything. Yeah, but anyways, so for clarification, by the way for the chat, I am actually a small business owner and because I said owner and not worker, I have a very specific use case for both using NixOS and not using NixOS because as a result, because my place of business is many miles away from my house because I don't work from home, I have a computer at my business. I also have a computer here at my home. A big benefit that I can personally see with NixOS is having the same computer in both locations because I can sync that Nix configuration between the two systems and have exactly the same system. Of course, I can't use NixOS because some of the applications that I use at work just don't work with NixOS because NixOS is not Linux file system compliant as in they put their root directories in different places than what other distros do. And of course that breaks many business related applications or enterprise related applications. So I can't use NixOS, but if those applications worked, I could actually very well see myself be using NixOS. All right, before we jump into the thing is let's talk a little bit about the package manager because that is one of the things that people kind of tout, not necessarily just because it's on NixOS itself, but because it's transportable between different distros. Like the idea of having one package manager that you can have everywhere kind of like Snap or FlatPacks, but with a much broader selection of packages and the ability to run things that aren't containerized in Snaps or FlatPacks. So a lot of people think that the Nix package manager is like, oh, this thing is really, really awesome. I've used it and it pisses me off a lot because just like with NixOS, they do things differently in ways that really make it hard for the packages that you install to interact with packages are installed normally. So because they're installed in a weird place, they set their own paths and stuff. It makes it hard to interact with the rest of the system. So that always bugged me quite a bit, but the idea behind it is intriguing at least. Josh, you had something to say? Yeah, so the Nix package manager, just to let everybody know, Nix is actually a source-based distribution, like actually source-based distribution, but they do it very differently from like Gen2 because you're not always gonna be compiling things from the source on your system. It's just if you're the first person to install the package as it's been declared, yes, you will be compiling it. So every now and then you might call an update or change to your configuration and you might be wondering why your system, why your command is taking three hours because it decided to compile Chromium or something. But anyways, what they do is when a package gets compiled, it gets pushed into a public cache. And then at that point, it's basically just like a pseudo binary distribution back to you anyway. So if you're the first person to install something, you're gonna be compiling. If you're the second person to be installing, that means that somebody already compiled it for you. You can give them a thanks. But the biggest benefit for the package manager is that they've got over 80,000 applications you can install through it. And the fact that you can install on other distros is not necessarily unique to Nix itself because you can install package managers on other distributions. The difference is that the Nix package manager also can recognize if it's running as the system or if it's running as a user. And it won't board your root file system like others will. Instead, what it'll just be doing is just dropping all of its files into a brand new folder that it places in root file system called slash Nix. Yeah, so this is one thing that I did test in NixOS. And the idea that it's transportable and you can put it anywhere, and you said 80,000 packages, well, the AUR has 86,000 packages, but AUR cannot become- And it's still an impressive number. So, but again, like I said earlier, the fact that you can install multiple versions of an application through that package manager is awesome. And for connections like mine, I see a benefit, like Tyler made me aware earlier, that it saves a little bit on a bandwidth and saves on other stuff. So I was wondering why it was pulling all these thousands of files, but it does it in a very good fashion and putting them in a tempFS and then moving the thing. It's a very robust package manager. And speaking of other package manager being available to other distros, I found out the other day that Pac-Man is available on Debian and Fedora and whatever, and APT is available on Arch and Fedora and- I mean, you can put any package manager on whatever distro you want. I mean, that's been- Yeah, I didn't know that for a very long time. I just figured that out. So I'm late to the game. So Nick's OS package manager is pretty neat. And I did try it on the Steam Deck briefly because Chris Tytus recommended it in one of his guides. It just works. It just works. And I never had any issues installing packages and dependencies and whatnot, unlike Arch. Oh, the dependency hell on Arch. I love that someone in chat is talking about APT on Fedora. I mean, like, there are some package managers that are meant to go other places and then there are some that are not. And that's a good example. That and APT-RPM does exist, by the way. Theoretically, you can install anything on any distro that you want if you're willing to put the work in it. Doesn't mean that you should. Exactly. Exactly. It doesn't mean that you should, but you can. But you guys definitely give DNF on opens to the try. It's actually pretty awesome. But anyways, let's go ahead and move on to the last section, unless you guys have anything else to say about NixOS right now. Anything going on? This is a great question. I'm not really. All right, so I have been ganged up upon. I have been bullied. I have been trolled. Everyone just piled on and forced me to change the last section of the show. And we're no longer calling them thingies of the week. They are now and forever more called. God help me. Nuggets of the week. Sucks it. Uh-oh. I'll eat a nugget of that one. I already ate all my things. I didn't get any. Anyways, so this is the thing where we talk about the things that are interesting. So Tyler, God damn it, you're Nugget of the week. Yes. My Nugget of the week is actually quite simple. I think I've probably talked about it before, but I'm not too sure. I may not have. And if I haven't, I'm so sorry y'all. It's Eddie. If you're ever needing to install a deb package, Eddie is a great installer. It comes from elementary OS. But I mean, you can obviously install it anywhere you need to install a deb. It's great. I really do love it. It's a program that you probably don't need. Well, especially if you know what you're doing, you definitely don't need it. But it is a very good program. It looks good. It's fast. It does exactly what you expect it to. There's no weird settings that you need to mess with. Like it's great. So that's mine. Yeah, my Nugget of the week. I forgot to push it to the repo, but I mentioned it earlier. It's CasaOS. CasaOS basically is a container manager, kind of like Portainer, but a much simpler version of that. Even my grandma can do it. It's just one command, one terminal bash command. You run in terminal. That's it. You run this command. So you install those packages. You run the command. You're up and running. And if you want to start installing containers, it's an app manager. It's kind of like a NAS OS. Think about it like a NAS OS, except you can run it on top of your desktop instead of being a full operating system, not giving you full granularity over your operating system. Anyway, you run that. You access it via your IP address or local host or whatever you use to remap your local host to. I use zero-volt.local. So basically, and my problem with it is it doesn't create its own self-signed certificate and thus you will end up with always having this pop-up telling you an insecure connection, insecure connection depends on how you set up your browser. Anyway, but since it's offline for me, I don't care. I just access it and then turn off the computer, but it's so simple. And they allow you to add the, for example, there's the Linux server. They have over 10,000 docker containers that you can select from. So you can just add that list to the application list and then your list will be populated, updated. And you can just, all you need to do is select the container you want, single click on it, it will do everything for you. And then when you wanna use it, it opens in a new tab and you're up and running. You don't have to think about anything complex at all. You don't have to think about IPs or configurations or whatever, but this one removes the need to use NextCloud, at least if you're using it just locally in your home local network, because it automatically shares all the drives, all the folders, everything. There is a big, big problem for me. It even shares the root drive and your root file system. I talked to the developers and they're gonna send me a configuration script to hide the root file system because that's not what I wanna share or not what I wanna be clicking on by mistake. But other than that, and it's a work in progress. It's an open source project with a big community behind it and they're very friendly on the server. Not very active, but very friendly when they are. And I recommend it. I really, really highly recommend it if you wanna, if you have a computer that you use as a storage computer, like a NAS, but you wanna have a desktop as well to play around with from time to time and just, and you can access. There is something I asked the developers, I haven't received a reply yet. We needed a phone app for it. There isn't no phone app. The only reply from one user I got, just add it to home, open it in your browser and add it to home screen. Use a web app, create a web app out of it. Josh, your Nuggy of the Week place. My Nuggy of the Week is Tellin' It. The old-fashioned command that we use since before the days of SSH. It's a remote control protocol, completely not encrypted, but there is a link that I'm gonna post here in the YouTube chat. If you're on that command, you can use that to watch the very first Star Wars movie in your terminal. Archolenex had that in the very first releases of Archolenex. But anyways, I've had to use Tellin' It recently. You know, talking to old classic servers that don't have SSH installed, but for some reason, Tellin' It ports open. So that was fun and interesting. Thanks, Chinese machines, thanks. Like recently, and I finished watching a video where he was reintroducing us to a dial-up internet. Okay. That's actually a wonderful series. Yeah. Very interesting. I missed the handshake. But anyways, my Nuggy of the Week, God, I hate that name, is, I'm gonna go ahead and choose City Skylines 2. It is, so if you ever played City Skylines 1, it's that but better. It's obviously the sequel. It plays wonderfully on Linux. There's a few general, like graphics, like artifacts that go on every like rare once in a while. But other than that, it plays as well as you could expect on any operating system. And if you're into city builders, it's the best one by far. Like it's so, so good. And it's so much better than the first one even because they've integrated so many of the mod ideas that burn City Skylines 1 right into the game. So they've done some things with traffic manager and stuff like that and the engineering stuff. Anyways, just, it's a really, really, really good game if you're into city's buildings. If you're not into city building games, then maybe you won't like it. But it's like Sim City from back in the day, but on steroids. It's a fantastic game. All right. Anyway, so that's it for this episode of the Linuxcast. Before we go, we should talk about the contact information. If you wanna get in contact with us, you can do so in any number of ways. The best way is to head on over to the website, which I swear is going to get updated again eventually. I'm just working on some stuff in the background with it. So it does have most of the previous episodes all the way back to season one. You can also find the blog posts that I've done so far up there as well. Josh, you can find him on his website, 10lyj.com slash contact, I remembered. Tyler has a YouTube channel where he's actually been posting videos. It's really weird. He's been posting more videos than I have. You can head on over there, check him out, make sure you subscribe. YouTube.com slash Zanio G is where you'll find him. Steve is on Fosodon or Mastodon at Fosodon.org slash at zero Linux zero with an X. And you can find all this stuff if you wanna find all the rest of their links to their discords and all of their websites and stuff like that. You can find that at thelinxcast.org slash contact. You can follow me obviously at the Linuxcast on Mastodon as well. And if you wanna support me, you can do so at patreon.com slash linxcast or head on over to the store where you'll find all sorts of awesome merchandise sets that shop at thelinxcast.org. So before we jump out, we should take a moment to thank my current patrons. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon. You guys are all awesome. Thank you so very, very much for that. Without you, the channel just won't be anywhere near where it is right now. And the podcast probably wouldn't still be going, just to be honest with you. Half the time I just, other people really want the podcast, but I better do one. I'm not gonna take a week off. So motivation, it's awesome. Anyways, patreon.com slash linxcast. We record this live every Saturday at three o'clock PM Eastern time and we switch around topics. And I don't know, I wrote down who's topic is next and forgot what I forgot. And I think it's Steve's topic. It's gonna be awesome. I'm sure. Anyways, make sure you turn in tune in next Saturday. If you wanna watch this live, if not, we'll have it edited and posted on the channel shortly afterwards. So thanks to everybody for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye.