I’m doing Nix consulting-type jobs - it can mean anything from simply packaging some stuff for Nix and making a devShell to refactoring existing Nix-based infra (which can be hundreds of thousands of SLOC) to building entirely new developer UX, CI/CD and even production deployments on Nix/NixOS. I’ve also been paid to implement some cool features into Nix itself, fix bugs, etc. I’m really quite happy with the job, even though it could probably pay more :)

Eh, probably if Guix becomes significantly better I’ll switch to it (from NixOS). I really like how seriously they take user freedom, bootstrapping (only 357 bytes of binary to bootstrap everything else from source!) and consistent user interfaces (scheme everywhere). But unfortunately the package repo is just not big and mature enough yet, and declarative configuration options are not as good as they are with NixOS. My job is also Nix-related, and that’s another major reason I’m staying for now.

No, it’s not. It’s a word predictor trained on most of the web. On its own it’s a pretty bad search engine because it can’t reliably produce the training data (that would be overfitting). What it’s kind of good at is predicting what the result would look like if someone asked a somewhat novel question. But then it’s not that good at producing the actual answer to that question, only imitating what the answer would look like.

I’m surprised it took this long. The world is crazy over AI, meaning everyone and their grandma is likely trying to do something like this right now. The fact it took like 3 years for an actual vulnerability “discovered by AI” (actually it seems it was discovered by the researcher filtering out hundreds of false positives?) tells me it sucks ass at this particular task (it also seems to be getting worse, judging by the benchmarks?)

Touchscreen (and 2-in-1) support in general is quite good, both Gnome and Plasma (two most popular “desktop environments”) support it well. It should be about as responsive as it is on Windows, because the response time generally comes from hardware and not software. However, I must warn you that I’ve had a similar HP 2-in-1 (although a different model) and there simply wasn’t a Linux driver for the touchscreen so it didn’t work at all; all the other tablet-like features worked fine. I would first check on a liveUSB - the touchscreen should work there the same as it will on the installed distro. If it doesn’t work, well, there’s your answer.

If by GNUIX you mean GNU Guix, they yeah it’s good enough. I’ve tried it on real hardware and didn’t find any issues. I would consider switching to it, but my day job is Nix-related so I’m running NixOS to make things easier. The learning curve is really steep for both Guix and Nix but I think their approach is great in the long term and worth investing some time into.

read a filename from the user

Honestly for something repetitive like this I’d suggest trying to avoid user interaction completely. It’s probably better to get that info from the DVD drive itself (blkid -o value -s LABEL /dev/dvd), or if that fails assign a number.

First they came for 486, and I did not speak out - because I’ve never actually owned a 486…

Thanks! I will try and report the results back to you.

Do I have to build all other parts myself before then? (I’m trying to package it for Nix so that other people can also build it more easily)

Are there any instructions on how to build this all to get the ventoy installer binary that can replace upstream? Or is the project not up to this stage yet? I can go without Windows and FreeBSD support.

AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren’t really good/solid and won’t save you for sure

I’ve been using my laptop in areas without internet for days. It works fine.

It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.

I have appimage-run from nixpkgs installed, which handles all those details. They are also not too hard to figure out manually should you need to.

Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you’re missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn’t deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you’re cooked.

GPU drivers are emphatically not part of the AppImage. They are provided by Mesa, which is almost guaranteed to be installed.

Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem

It’s actually the other way around - if you want your GPU to work properly on a new Windows install, you have to fish around for AMD/NVidia drivers. On Linux Mesa is pretty much pre-installed on all distros.

It is way more likely that you’ll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.

LMAO, try moving a windows installation from Ryzen+AMD GPU to Intel+NVidia GPU and let me know how it goes (hint: you will have to manually uninstall, and then install a shit ton of drivers, for which you will need internet).

Meanwhile I’m typing this from a (Ryzen+AMD GPU) desktop which has an SSD from my (Intel+integrated graphics) laptop. When I plugged it in, it booted into sway just fine, with complete GPU support and all, and the only reason I had to update my config is to make it more convenient to use on the desktop.

Linux is not the best “apocalypse” OS, but it sure is better than Windows.

There are ways to deal with this. There’s AppImage for GUI apps (that replicates the “just get an exe from a friend on a flash drive”) and lots of bundling programs for non-GUI apps (I use nix-bundle because I use Nix, but there are other options too).

Lots of distro installers work offline too, by just bringing all the stuff you need as part of the installer.

And one major benefit of Linux is that when stuff does inevitably go wrong, it’s infinitely easier to fix than proprietary garbage.

They only dedup runtimes, not individual dependencies.

Not sure I follow you entirely, but I think we agree.

No, not quite. Flatpak is containers - it just stuffs every dependency that an application needs in a directory with no way to deduplicate or update independently. Gobo is a bit more nuanced, since dependencies are shared between applications when the versions match.

I think the main premise is that every version of every software has its own installation prefix. This allows you to mix&match different versions, perform atomic upgrades, etc. You can think of it as a proto-Nix. TBH I don’t see much point in it now that Nix(OS) and Guix exist, or, if you don’t like their purity, stal/IX.

To be clear, NVidia supplies Linux drivers, but they are proprietary semi-broken nonsense.

Yep, NixOS as a base + some Flatpak store for installing apps. In fact, use impermanence to just drop all OS state apart from logs, network settings and flatpaks. That way, “turn it off and then on again” will almost always work to fix the OS.

It’s not too bad tho, we’ve already replaced this with Github actions: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/356023