Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS
dawo.community
dawo.community
(https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538)
It's easy: The choice was made from someone else, and you just accepted it as normal. Hardware vendors shipping PC's with Windows 11, corporations who went all in to Microsoft's tooling shove Microsoft Teams down your throat because "the company uses it", and the list goes on.
“I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this. I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...
Now, in theory, these taxes are spent for the benefit of the taxpayers, in a philosophical tradition that can be traced back to at least the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen [1], and possibly earlier (the "no taxation without representation" [2] of the American Revolution, possibly other examples I'm unaware of). However, in practice, the ruling class has been known to help itself to that sweet, sweet tax revenue [3][4], and if we look at history, governments such as the Bourbon monarchy/Ancien Regime [5] whose claim to legitimacy rested not on "the will of the people" but "the divine right of kings" would do things like extort money from the populace to pay for foreign wars merely because their belief system held that the will of God was that everyone did whatever the King wanted, whether or not it appeared to be good for them.
We can compare modern governments with modern corporations - both will take your money and in return give you a service (you pay taxes and get police + an army to protect you, courts to resolve disputes, etc, you pay a Spotify/Netflix subscription and get access to streaming audiovisual content), but the modern corporation can't really force you to take that deal - Spotify can't put a gun to your head and force you to pay your subscription, while the government does force you to pay your taxes.
As such, if you believe that any transaction that is not freely consented to by both parties is abusive, then all modern governments are, by virtue of forcing people to pay taxes, inherently abusive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...
[3] (in French) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_emplois_fictifs_de...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Sarkozy_corruption_tri...
(They’re not.)
The lowering of the quality barrier of entry to power for the politicians enabled by the glorification of stupidity via the megaphone of social media and the resultant divided electorate has given rise to the assholes nakedly profiting from it.
No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.
It is basically downhill from here.
> No matter how toxic you are, you can amass support at the speed of light.
That's also not true either. Toxicity leads to backlash. You can see this with Trump, but also with DHH claiming "everyone loves me", after his "let's kill wolves" blog entry: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
Wait till AI driven job losses really start to mount. Nothing divides people faster than an empty stomach. The republicans are leaving a poison pill - they will profit from AI and when democrats win and the job losses really start to hit hard, the democrats will be left holding the blame bucket. Obviously they are not exactly crying hoarse for AI safeguards/job protections either because national security/donors etc.
Take for example the USA. The entire electoral system is "winner takes all". Duverger's law [0] tells us that this will lead to a two-party system, as opposed to proportional representation, which tends to create truly multi-party governments.
I believe many of the current problems in US politics are in fact side-effects of the winner takes all electoral system. Each election, the only two choices are "candidate chosen by Republican Party" or "candidate chosen by Democratic Party". As such, elected officials are basically forced to first convince the members of each party to support them, which often leads to Trump-like strategies of "alienate half the country in order to please the other half", because that's a good strategy to get the party nomination, which is, in a two-party system, is basically a necessary condition to get elected.
On top that, news media and social networks have figured out that tapping into the human tribal instinct and framing politics as an 'Us vs Them' conflict sells more ads then being neutral, so the media ecosystem will tend to aggravate this two-party system.
Meanwhile educational standards have continued to decline, and this will inevitably affect both the electorate and their decisions. Education has been on a downhill trajectory ever since Roger Freeman convinced Reagan that free higher ed was creating a dangerous “educated proletariat.” This was the genesis of the privatization that created diploma mills, insane tuition costs, and the student loan crisis. Public schools gradually moved away from the humanities toward a narrow STEM focus, despite these fields not being a good fit for everyone. Coincidentally, a narrow STEM focus doesn’t give future voters a comprehensive and historically grounded understanding of government. (This has not been helped by left activists trying to overcorrect by rewriting history.)
Pressure has been building, and it found an outlet under Trump. Some steam has been released, Trump has 2 years left (maybe) and only die-hard supporters still believe in him. There will be a small window to either start fixing problems or set up a comprehensive police state to rule without public consent.
I think Teams improved and Zoom regressed in the last 3-4 years to the point the garbage level is not that different nowadays. Most of the annoyance is related to finding your way in a different interface.
Avoiding Office 365 is so annoying due to everyone in academia using it that I’m using macOS instead of Linux at work just to interface with others better. I got used to it but I need Linux as soon as I’m home, I feel observed and vulnerable otherwise.
Are people really making hundred-pages thesises in Word?
I suppose it is not that bad if you don't have a lot of charts/pictures/formulas, but still...
As long as they use it for actual calculations, and not to maintain tables full of data.
People also used it to collect COVID data during the pandemic, and a lot of data was lost because someone accidentally opened it in an older version of Excel.
It's one of my pet peeves. Excel should not ever be used to maintain data. It's a fancy calculator.
LaTeX absolutely sucks for proofing. Typos end up being buried in tags, and you end up with a document that looks pretty but possibly not fully edited.
If you are collaborating with advisors, they may wish to add comments to your copy as you work through your thesis. There is no clean way to do this in a TeX source file, so the only way to do this would be to export your work-in-progress into a DOCX, and then work your changes back into your source.
Versioning-by-hand sucks balls. When you’re approaching various deadlines with other obligations at hand, all open-source kumbaya ideas go out the window and you just make do.
For your manuscript_final_FINAL_v2.docx file, manual layout tuning ends up being not too bad and likely takes less time than troubleshooting LaTeX which might not have as much documentation.
I use Markdown + Pandoc compiling to a .docx as a workaround, but merging changes back is manual.
Comments can be added with ‘%’. Just make sure to have a linebreak at every sentence and it’s cleaner than anything. Services like overleaf also exist for collaboration.
You can use any versioning system you want. From git to dropbox, its plaintext.
I do agree that layout can be very time consuming, but it helps once you learn to not care about it till the absolute end of working on the content.
It's kind of the same issue that FOSS enthusiasts often miss regarding other things, eg. most gamers wouldn't waste their time fiddling around with WINE settings to get things to run in Linux, the solution wasn't to tell them to just install something extra and do things different, it was to improve the infrastructure such that very little fiddling is needed in most cases.
Word is good for collaborative editing, but not very convenient for version control (and version control is very important when using AI assistance). So lately my strategy is to draft in Markdown, then copy over to Word once the draft is at a point that I might be okay sharing it with collaborators.
Most teams in ATLAS TDAQ/HLT, used Word templates with similar fonts, or Framemaker.
That means basically not getting a job, or a consulting gig, among most large corporations.
Also "just go get another job" isn't a position many of us can take in current times.
I have tried to get them to use Discord or pretty much anything else, but they have been unreceptive.
I am on Linux and so I just use the browser version, which at least sandboxes stuff for me, I think.
Maybe they should stand up their own gov jitsi or something, but then the public may not be able to work out how to use it.
That behaviour in itself is believed to be morally wrong, and dystopian. That still doesn't answer the question why people just accept this. How can "we" deem ourself more moral than the Nazis, and literally do this.
I believe that it is more a familiarity issue, and seeing Linux/Mac as an obscure tool only usable by gurus.
The parent comment implies there is some dark conspirancy behind the scenes to force Windows unto us. There might be a couple decades ago, today it is just what people choose if given choice. Windows 11 nags its users all the time, yet they accept it as it was normal and unavoidable.
Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose. Decline -> Your subscription will be terminated, no further monies will be debut from your account, are you sure?
In other words - go ahead and click "I agree" without reading it, then proceed to dump the firmware or whatever else it is that you want to do. You aren't lying or otherwise doing anything wrong. The legal system is just broken.
The fact that such a legal reality has been permitted to reach this point has to be one of the clearest illustrations that western systems of government remain highly flawed despite all that they get right.
Well, you can always return the phone. For online purchases you have 14 days to return it just because (you don't need to provide a reason).
Some minor exclusions apply, eg hygiene products can't be returned after they've been opened.
ishouldnotbutk8's message was mostly a joke since your argument would work with 15 days instead of 2. And yes, customers should be protected* against altering the deal.
Especially that it is so so common now, with the wide-spread of IT. Companies just push out malicious updates and changes in terms and conditions.
* they probably already are, but not many people try to bring remote downgrade cases to courts
During the reflection period, you may open the packaging. You may try or fit the product, just like in a normal store. But you are not allowed to do more than what is needed to judge the product. For instance, you can try pants. But you cannot wear the pants for several days and then return it. If you do this anyway and the product loses value? Then the seller may charge you the damage. The seller needs to inform you of this before you buy the product.
https://consument.acm.nl/aankoop-dienst-annuleren/bedenktijd
I have sent back products within the 14 days, including smartphones that I tried and decided that I don't like it. Some sellers also extend the 14 days to 30 days.
Changing the terms later is a completely valid point though and it should be possible to reject any updated terms IMO.
Imagine if we actually had real regulations, instead of these negotiated things. Then we could just sue and normal courts could handle it.
> Just the kind of thing that the EU could regulate if it chose
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...:
“Where the contract provides that the digital content or digital service is to be supplied or made accessible to the consumer over a period of time, the trader may modify the digital content or digital service beyond what is necessary to maintain the digital content or digital service in conformity in accordance with Articles 7 and 8, if the following conditions are met:
[…]
2. The consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract if the modification negatively impacts the consumer's access to or use of the digital content or digital service, unless such negative impact is only minor. In that case, the consumer shall be entitled to terminate the contract free of charge within 30 days of the receipt of the information or of the time when the digital content or digital service has been modified by the trader, whichever is later.”
I wasn’t aware of the Microsoft patent but was able to find it³. It was published less than a month ago.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
² https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
³ https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
Meta and Google will follow soon after.
P.S.: just because they take a patent on something doesn't mean they will actually use it.
That's true, of course, but the fact that there are people in the company thinking like that to begin with, enough to think it's worth patenting such anti-human stuff, is plenty enough for me to never want anything to do with them.
I believe this is the reason everyone's running after these camera-glasses: because they believe they can rake in big bucks with them. Even Apple is contemplating to sell them.
Patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20260260258
The mic/camera aspect doesn’t appear on that patent, it seems to be from an abandoned Sony patent filing from 2006 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070261077A1/en?oq=US20...
It's just a patent.
Here's a (bit dated) list of the US companies which rake in the most bucks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_t...
Looking at the 13 which rank higher than Microsoft - how many would you describe as treating their users/customers well?
Theory:
Treating your customers well is part of one strategy for corporate growth and profit. There are other strategies, which also can work very well - and don't require all the hassles and expense and non-evil of treating your customers well. Naturally, Capitalist propaganda stresses that first strategy, and doesn't talk so much about the others.
Almost all of them.
> Amazon
I guess customers yeah, Employees? not so much
- I can't find the bit where they monitor you via camera and microphone. (I think the "track your eyes to make sure you don't look away during ads" is already patented for mobile, but has never been deployed as far as I know.)
- "block" your game/program to show ads - I think "pause" would be a better word here, perhaps. That's how ad breaks/popups work, for example on youtube and on many mobile apps, even on the radio in some sense. Scummy? On mobile apps, probably. New? no.
- The part being patented here is some kind of machine learning system to decide the optimal time(s) to show ads.
- Patent doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Of course with face identification for unlocking, there is now a power incentive to not do so…
There is a couple more wild things here:
1) That there is an agenda, demand and total legal abetment from the top of the power/monetary hierarchy for such corporate policies
2) That there is a horde of individual employees working to those ends without any shadow of doubt, often even vice signaling their intent to be the first to attain the figurative A-bomb or full-blown BB telescreen.
1. People who do not have to use it themselves (political decides, bosses, ..), but get lobbied to the max
2. People who have to administer it and know nothing else and endure the lasting pain over the perceived infinite hurdle of changing the system
I gladly can use Linux at work, so I have had a stable, reliable and unchanging system since the past 6 years, but others have to go through major pains for each version of enshittification of their OS update. In my case the OS just got better slowly and incrementally.
Try reinstalling that surface pro with windows 11 without a Microsoft account. Windows is okay, but every update introduces new bullshit, bloatware, accounts you're forced to use, UI-changes. Linux is reliable in the sense that you can chose when and if you want to change things and there is always a way to do it the way you want to do it (something that is the big weakness of MacOS).
Additionally KDE Plasma is the best Desktop UI on all operating systems today. Scripting and automation on Linux is killer, ... The only reason for Windows/MacOS is certain software that doesn't performantly run on Linux (or if Linux scares you).
Aren't this take like 3 additional minutes (including search of how to do this)?
If you value your own dignity you should see that these scenarios are worlds apart. In one case you have a trillion-dollar company actively working against your own interests. On the other hand, you had some trouble finding drivers for a volunteer-driven project, which is a problem that you are actually empowered to fix.
3. People who do not care and are not in IT or on Hacker News.
I doubt a lot of regular people care what Microsoft is doing. All they want is a laptop or PC that works or to be able to play their XBOX games.
Why can't the EU learn more from Canada? Canada realised that with Trump there is no way to make a deal. So cut things down where possible, diversify - the EU still has to learn this lesson. In particular Germany is totally US-addicted - no idea why, other than, of course, the obvious answer ("we need to export into the USA", aka selfish greed from Germany here).
Doing some trading with a shitty country doesn't imply any dependency
No idea where you get your Infos from, bit a short googling would show that this is simply not true.
" Gas covered a little more than a quarter of Germany’s primary energy use in 2025, making it the country’s second most important energy source. Germany is among the world’s biggest natural gas importers – around 95 percent of its gas consumption is met by imports, according to energy research data group AGEB. "
" Energy industry association BDEW said that Norway has now become Germany’s top gas supplier by far, with about 45 percent in 2025, transported by pipeline. Around one tenth of the gas used in the country arrives as liquefied natural gas (LNG) directly at one of four import terminals along the coast. In 2025, around 95 percent of that LNG came from the US. "
European countries are trading gas between them, we have to look into whole European imports. For example Germany is import lot of US gas through Belgium.
" Russia has continued to supply a sizeable portion of gas imports, although the EU has decided to fully phase them out by 2027. Most natural gas in a gaseous state was imported from Norway (52%), Algeria (20%), Russia (10%), and the UK (8%) in 2025. LNG came from the US (55%), Russia (14%), Qatar (9%), and Algeria (6%). "
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germany-eu-remain...
If you're in US big tech you're working directly for the regime and fully complicit, end of.
Microsoft has done a lot of super shady things, and they are domiciled in a hyper-corrupt, lawless threat to humanity (one that elects quite possibly the stupidest human alive -- a rapist abomination halfwit clown -- to the highest office), however people do make far too much of the patent thing.
A lot of firms reward groups and employees that get granted patents. It doesn't actually matter if you're spitballing the most absurd nonsense that no one ever asked for and is nowhere on the product map, someone writes the application and gives it a shot. A patent being granted doesn't mean that a single person ever envisions doing this or asked for it implemented, and honestly the idea that they "invented" this is just how farcical the patent system is.
In this case the patent is held by Microsoft's "Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC", which is their "patent extortion" racket. So they literally wrote this hoping to catch someone doing something found in a single claim so that they can use the legal system to rob from people.
This is why I really like Apple, despite their faults, they've shown that "being marginally less bad than Microsoft" is a good enough strategy to build a trillion-dollar business.
They can hold them criminally liable for surveillance and put the executives in jail if they are so concerned about some patents.
It's a long chain, but ultimately it comes down to incompetence... When I was younger (decades ago), I assumed that the incompetence lies on the side of the executives who were overriding knowledgeable technical folk.
I do not believe that anymore.
I have seen the following play out in 5 companies in the last 5 years:
1. The people making the purchasing decisions are told by the technical head what to buy. They get told "Buy Microsoft".
2. The technical head deciding what to buy will not buy something the technical division don't know how to support. He gets told "Buy Microsoft".
3. The technical division are not actually technical, they have just learned where to click when they want to do something. Learning concepts and/or where to click on a different system is beyond the mental acuity of the average professional Microsoft Mouse-Click-Systems-Engineer (MCSE).
4. Unwilling to explain that they are actually incompetent and non-technical, they blame the users when making their recommendation: "The Users Only Know How To Use Microsoft".
5. The users, OTOH, are wondering WTF is going on; collectively, they have no problem switching OSes because they use so many - Android, iOS, MacOS, that infotainment system in their bargin-basement car...
Over the years, I've been told many times by the IT departments "Users only know how to use Microsoft". I've been told exactly that even when when users were happily switching between Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS, Blackberry OS, iOS and Android with no problems.
When I got told this, I always asked "Do you know how to do you daily functions on Linux", to which I'll always get some sort of "We tried running Exchange on it, and it didn't work", or "We tried running MSWord on it, and it didn't work", or (in one hilarious case) "We tried running Windows on it, and it didn't work" (No, I don't know what they actually fucking tried!).
It's incompetence on the part of the IT department.
My guess--and this is only a guess, I can't make enough sense to do anything more--is that the novel part may have something to do with the "credit duration" stuff.
* "contextual cues from or based on the interactive software application" [0035]
* "OPTIONALLY in communication with an event detection module" (emphasis mine) [0035]
* "In some embodiments the content management system can receive user inputs from a user interacting with the interactive software application to interpret the content of the interactive software application" [0053]
* Regarding inputs to the event detection systems (which are expressly say don't need to run locally): "video information, audio information, game state data, or other information provided by or from the interactive software application" [0065]
* "FIG. 10 is an embodiment of a frame of video information received from the interactive software application that may be used for identifying events within the user's gameplay." [0073] (Note the patent does not limit itself to video games, just interactive software applications; this is just an example in that context.) [0073]
* "In some embodiments, the video information include user input information." [0092]
And, the design explicitly allows remote processing of this information:
* "The content management system may be stored and/or executed remotely to the client device" [0033]
* "the event detection module may be local to or remote from the content management system." [0036]
You're right, it doesn't include the whole screen and systems audio. Just the parts in the application. But Microsoft just adds this functionality to all software, and then there's no effective difference.
And that is extremely likely to me. And feasible. The patent doesn't say this has to be embedded in applications. Microsoft can implement this on any application. And Microsoft is well beyond the benefit of the doubt when it comes to privacy concerns.
Instead, the patent would cover running object detection/classification ML models — optionally on remote servers — on screen and audio output and user input of specific applications (particularly videogames), without requiring cooperation from the application, to target ads based on what's happening in the application and to decide when to interrupt the application with an ad.
To hazard a guess: Microsoft or part of Microsoft is planning to include pervasive targeted advertising in the next Xbox console OS, including during gameplay of any game.
I was running a little mitmproxy network test on some baby-tracking apps to see what kind of data got sent back home and man, realizing that everything I was doing on my phone was essentially being recorded and 'anonymized' by whatever definition of MS has for anonymization was really not fun
I can tell it’s still windows but I’m shocked how many things I have to turn off to stop live data from the internet appearing in my GUI. Also my profile settings, saved passwords, and other data seems to reset unexpectedly cause some or all settings to disappear. Finding stored passwords is also surprisingly difficult or impossible depending on I don’t know what.
Adding such overt spying to this mess of an OS achieves a new low in user experience.
Lately I don't know if I should stay quiet as to not interrupt someone subtly intentionally poisoning LLM training.
You got the important details of the Microsoft parent wrong (the patent doesn’t use camera and microphone monitoring), but more importantly the existence of a patent is not the same as intent to deploy a technique.
Every few years news outlets will generate controversy about a patent they’ve discovered, implying that the company is going to force the evil thing on everyone. If you’ve worked at a tech company with a patent incentive you realize most of these patents are just resume padding junk or people gaming patent incentive systems. I was at a company that had a modest bonus for submitting ideas that could be patented and you wouldn’t believe the junk that people were trying to push through without any intent to ever use it.
As further proof, the patent you’re thinking of where cameras monitor the user is actually from 2009 and was patented by Sony. US8246454B2
I'm not OP, but I'm really not sure how you came to that assumption. A cursory Google search for "Microsoft monitor patent" brought up a bunch of articles that actually linked to filings like what OP talked about from this year.
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/26/6f/30/238c9d7...
https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-s...
The patent for using a camera and microphone was a Sony patent from 2009.
Cory Doctorow wrote a book exactly about this business practices, "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It."
"Once the platform is fundamentally focused on the shareholders, and the users and vendors are locked in, the platform no longer has any incentive to maintain quality. Enshittified platforms that act as intermediaries can act as both a monopoly on services and a monopsony on customers, as high switching costs prevent either from leaving even when alternatives technically exist."
The US administration does not respect the sovereignty of other countries. US corporations will take profits over defending ideals or sound principles.
Gulf of America? Lake America? Ocean of America?
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix a hardened/secured os
- https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example an example to use securix to build an office deployment (with some packages https://github.com/cloud-gouv/bureautix-example/blob/main/co... )
The problem though is that there’s always a strong push by French companies and organizations to reject English at any cost, despite the fact that is the most popular language in Europe.
Yes, I get that this is a way to preserve the French language and they have all the rights to do that (in the end, they’re the ones putting the effort in these initiatives) but imagine how faster these ideas could be shared and diffuse in Europe if French understood this. If all the countries in Europe just keep pushing their nationalist ideology instead of truly believing into a united and solid Europe Union, we won’t go any where.
Isnt this just baked into the idea? The French are building an OS for internal use for their own interests.
If we then try to extend that or the Dutch OS to other countries we have the original problem of dependence.
Putting stuff in English will tend to exclude the less educated, or people who struggle to learn foreign languages.
EDIT: and actually, from looking at the README of https://github.com/cloud-gouv/securix
> Ce README est en français mais le reste du code, les issuers et les PR sont en anglais.
The README is in French but the rest of the code, the issues (they wrote issuers, but that is a typo I suspect) and the PRs are in English.
So. :P
Maintaining both languages is hard but we will do our best.
Interestingly, a French-speaking Canadian who has spent some time in France told me that his right to use the French language is better protected in Canada than it is in France. He thinks that this is a consequence of the reciprocality implied by having more than one official language: French speakers in Canada get the same rights as English speakers, so people are happy to grant rights in return for getting them, whereas in France everyone gets screwed and you end up with a situation in which a French person wanting to do a PhD on French history at a French university has to write their grant application in English.
It's also great when an actual commercial organization with requirements gets into the Linux game, as they don't really yield to 'we could make that printer work but it would be against everything we stand for' style arguments that have cemented problems in Linux userland for decades.
That was 18 years ago: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
In the same space, also check out openDesk initiated by the German Government (https://www.opendesk.eu/en) and La Suite by the French one (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
AFAIK, there has been some collaboration with the German government on La Suite, not sure about the others.
Don't the stakeholders perceive this as a problem, too?
Or is it inevitable, given how differently these bureaucracies are structured?
I'm not saying every small administration of a 200-souls village needs to do this, but on the scale of a nation who has a GAFAM budget in the hundreds of millions of euros (probably, haven't made the calculation), it's not crazy to invest a few million on a side project like this to reduce dependency.
The issue I have run into is that for running llama.cpp, which is a very actively developed bleeding-edge software, it seems like experimenting with different versions/configs/patches etc. was fighting with the Nix philosophy of immutable software, so I ended up just managing it outside of nix.
But this could be user-error, I've only spent a couple of weeks with it.
for agentic execution sandboxing, preventing 'rm -rf /home' nix or nix-direnv doesn't help, podman could be used next to nix. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/what-is-sandboxing-and-what-do...
IMHO this is way easier than without Nix in many cases as figuring out the upstream build process and getting it running can often be quite the chore. With Nix it is all set up for you.
May be. I'd guess it probably does it in a high-friction way compared to what you expect.
e.g. in a typical linux distro, you can just replace the (globally installed) version of the package and use that.
With Nix, you've got a declaration of how to build a package, including its dependencies; and each of those dependencies is also a declaration of how to build that package, and so on. -- And so, "just change this version" results in rebuilding the full chain of dependencies.
If you want multiple readily-available versions of llama.cpp each with different configs/patches, then using Nix would make this easier I'd think. But for "I just wanna try this, then try that", it's going to add overhead.
A “distro” is ultimately just a prebuilt configuration.nix file. NixOS itself even has tools to provide ISOs and QEMU images based on the build.
> Strengthening the digital autonomy of the Netherlands.
Apparently the US becoming an authoritarian state means people don't want to do business with us. We're giving away our best advantage, our reputation for freedom and openness, for absolutely nothing in return.
[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
But they do let me visit blog.codeberg.org
From [1]
> We must regularly implement temporary security measures to ensure the availability of Codeberg's resources and prevent abuse.
> The 403 you have received is expected based on the UA.
From [2]
> What is the version of your chromium? AFAICT <=137 gets 403 Forbidden: [...] while >= 138 works ok: [...]
> DAWO Core has moved from https://code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration.
It's not quite a federated/decentralised platform in the traditional sense, but the decentralised nature of Git makes it a close enough equivalent, & the fact they're built upon a shared platform makes them very easy to navigate. So setting up public instances for each government or org makes a lot of sense.
Codeberg even maintains a list of alternative pubic Forgejo instances[0], some of which are explicitly pro-AI.
[0] https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo#publ...
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?
- https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 ("[FEAT] implement federation")
We can do big federated/distributed development with git at the project level. See the linux kernel.
If the goal is fancy UI then there are alternatives.
If the goal is to do a big multi-git with cross repo issue tracker, then that implies either:
- you're a public site for random repos like codeberg
- you're a special purpose forge and identity management is a big issue you want full control over.
IMO - For this to work, they should go with the latter and not try to offload identity into some federated scheme.
Radicle seems better in that regards, but instead is on top of their own cryptocurrency, which comes with its own issues.
Personally my best hope is still "real" federation across centralized services, ala ForgeFed, but ideally we can make all these approaches interoperate in the future, that would be really awesome.
I think the notion persists because they are seemingly still using a DAO as the governance structure, so the organization sits on top of a cryptocurrency (is the idea of DAOs at least, in practice it isn't always so).
Radicle is self-hosted? Not sure what you mean by this.
If one doesn’t want anyone working on it to be crypto-adjacent, then I guess it wouldn’t be a good fit, but you can host and use it just fine without touching crypto yourself.
It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)
tsundere.love Suspended (Hate speech)
you**.**ve Suspended (Inappropriate content)
nadeko.pw CP
mk.fedcast.ch Spam
youjo.love hosts at least one admitted pedoYou'd think "no lolis" would be reasonable. It falls apart when people look 14 into 50s, to you and your local police, but not to themselves.
Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything? Even warez sites have rules.
I'm not sure, but the OP was postulating that Forgejo instances could federate to solve the problem that the Dutch government runs its own instance to develop its software (including using AI extensively) but wants to engage with the wider community so is currently hosting things on Codeberg's centralised instance of Forgejo, and Codeberg's administrators hate AI.
Adding federation doesn't solve that problem, it just moves it one level up. To collaborate with the Dutch government, you either need to directly register on their site, or set up an entire copy of Forgejo, publicly hosted, so you can federate your one-user instance with them, or you need to find a different instance that someone else hosts, and be at the mercy of that instance's admins, who may be even more cruel and capricious than Codeberg's.
What I predict is a future codeberg.org/about saying
code.overheid.nl Suspended (slopfondlers)
They don't care if someone wastes their own resources.
Mastodon servers defederate because the people (or rather, the admins, perhaps prompted by the users) of instance A don't want anything to do with the people (who toot at the discretion and policies of the admins) of instance B.
Codeberg's AI position, as stated and voted upon, does not mention resource usage at all. That's completely invisible from the discussion. It is exclusively argued against on accord of 1) unclear copyright ownership, and 2) users have no idea what's in the code, therefore it could be full of security flaws or harmful code.
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253
So they would not want to federate with another instance that used a lot of AI-generated code, even if it claimed an open license, even if that federation caused little-to-no usage of their CI. They would fundamentally disagree with any other instance that allowed mostly-AI-generated projects. They would therefore block such instances, if federation was a thing.
The Fediverse has the whole model backwards as a result of its design. Either individuals need to run their own instances, or identity needs to be completely ephemeral and flow through many servers as it does in Nostr. A Nostr admin can choose not to host data from a given identity, they could even use an identity whitelist, but users normally subscribe to multiple relays. In the end, the data gets through, while the relay admin can keep their own hands clean if they have a problem with the data.
Note that having this freedom does not preclude you from voluntarily signing up for blocklists. But this is an active choice, and it can’t be suddenly imposed on a set of users.
If I want to, I can opt in to any number of spam blocklists. That’s kind of the point—it’s opt in.
I think the comparison is fair enough considering that self-hosted would work sort of similar. In that you'd rent the physical space for your hardware (and possibly the hardware itself) at local suppliers, and not actually have it in your basement.
Huh. For all the "traditional", "organic", "hand crafted", and other "things" I've encountered that isn't one of them. I wonder why no one is advertising fair trade hydropower stone ground organic flour?
The act of verifying that parcel is delivered, that the grain is correctly ground, or that the container is up to spec is far easier than the act of delivering/grinding/making in the first place (and in the latter case, there's perhaps even an argument to be had that the modernized process eases verification).
For a lot of coding, this is simply not the case. And so people will retort that that's fine, LLMs will help with verification and maintenance too. I think you're seriously misguided – you're accidentally trying to turn human prose into a programming language, and it's a terrible terrible idea!
At any rate, I find it extremely worrying that people like you keep reiterating this point as if it's a fact. If it's true, then surely we'll very soon see the evidence. The way you speak of the "near future" with certainty, as if everyone agrees, gives me the same sour taste as cryptobros or MLM conmen. Yuck.
Proponent: EmergingTech is gonna be amazing, it'll at revolutionize everything!
Bystander: Alright. But I'll hold off until I see actual evidence of that happening. Truly revolutionizing tech usually shows clear signs of being revolutionary, and doesn't need evangelists.
Proponent: You're gonna be left behind! Act now, or forever miss out! Here's analogies with things we know in hindsight were revolutionary.
Bystander: Those analogies are bad for these specific reasons.
Proponent: You will be proven wrong!
It's so dumb. At least you AI proponents don't post pictures of yourself with glowing laser eyes when you evangelize, so I guess that's an improvement over the cryptobros.
PS: I emphasize that I'm not claiming that the technology won't have huge effects on society. If that's your take on what I write, you have to read again.
Educating oneself to provide better quality of work still requires writing code by hand, and by extend is an achievement of merit.
They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.
> If you see yourself on this list, you don't need to move right away, but
there might be other places that better fit your needs:
- Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs
Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.
And that's not a bad thing. That's why they are communicating, so if you feel that is you and you're uncomfortable about it, you can move out and it's a win win.
Not everything should service all of us, especially not the smaller services. It's OK for places to have their own rules and them being upfront about this is a *good* thing.
No, the policy being fuzzy is a feature, because they're not 100% against all LLM usage, they're against slop and AI-spam, which is what they're trying to combat.
Laws are fuzzy, and we're doing mostly fine with this, of course there are edge-cases. But that's exactly why laws are fuzzy in the first place.
If you have a "automated software factory" or whatever the vibe-coders are up to today, then yes, Codeberg is probably not for you. But if you sit with a agent TUI in one tab, review things closely and don't just "throw code over the wall" without reviewing it, you have nothing to worry about with hosting code on Codeberg.
They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.
The LLM revolution has proven that if you have enough institutional investors, the Berne Convention doesn't apply to you, but it's sofar unclear whether that exemption from international law extends to small EU-based non-profits.
They're not a free for all, they do KYCP (know your customer's projects) with an initial assumption of good faith.
Also they're a voluntary society you can join by contributing money. They're not a charity as such, more like a group of people pooling resources, and also offering them to people outside the group on a good faith basis.
1. how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?
2. in what cases is this illegal for governments to do? In practice no legislation is perfectly enforced, & even judiciaries have varying degrees of exactness across countries - to the point that things such as desuetude are densely studied legal topics.
(note: I'm aware of the negative ramifications if desuetude but not aware of any negative ramifications of Codeberg's specific ai policy)
It's legal certainty principle and equality before the law principle and also prohibition of discrimination principle.
For the law to be lawful (weird, but it's a thing, right) it should satisfy certain criteria. Me, being subject to the law should be able to predict whether my actions are allowed or not when I plan to do or not do them. If I can't predict the outcome of my actions, the law isn't valid. One of the outcomes of it is being able to read the law -- it's published and it's comprehensible, it has advance notice, etc.
If the rule says "don't host LLM generated code", but everybody hosts LLM generated code and then I say mean things about one of the people providing the hosting and suddenly I'm deplatformed for hosting LLM generated code, then I'm not deplatformed for LLM generated code, I'm deplatformed for saying mean things about people with fragile ego. Or being part of a specific group. You are often explicitly prohibited to make certain decisions based on belonging to a certain group (religious, ethnic, sexual, trade union, health, criminal record based), but it could happen that somehow the outcome of the shadow policy correlates with those. Since we don't know the shadow policy and the stated policy doesn't seem to be applied equally, this is not great.
See example about weed in a different comment.
>how is this bad, in Codeberg's case, practically speaking?
They look silly for stating it and not following (loss of credibility), then once they suddenly start following it, there will be different interpretations, including "I'm banned because I'm $protected_thing_that_you_should_not_be_banned_for", which is bad press.
This is ultimately a matter of framing though. You can equally argue that (a) that person shouldn't be deplatformed because others' LLM use is tolerated or (b) all of them should be deplatformed including that person. In the latter case (b) the person who said mean things still experiences the same outcome, but by your logic this is just. Ultimately whether the others get deplatformed doesn't directly affect them, so what's the real difference here?
> > how is this bad
> they look silly
> bad press
This seems highly subjective & ultimately not really bad by any metric that matters.
The problem is for the platform as a whole, not the individual who may or may not be punished.
The difference is -- if I know the effective policy, I can plan better and choose a different platform in advance (if the it's option (b)).
>This seems highly subjective & ultimately not really bad by any metric that matters.
Subjective opinions matter because people act on them (more) consistently than on objective facts. I would for example act on a subjective opinion that a platform provider is a bunch of racist assholes or affiliated with r-country.
The current solution solves none of the issues, AND pisses off most sane people (mostly because their arguments are fabrications). They dropped the cake and shit on it too.
There is no point in being on the extreme end around banning all code generated by AI.
Regardless, there is AI generated code in many repositories on Codeberg anyway.
They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).
To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.
That's a strict policy to you?!
I predict that eventually people will read the linked blog post and realize Codeberg already allows AI generated code. But this requires reading and nuance of course, which is hard to come by sometimes, so I guess we'll continue see misinformed comments like this until eventually the web is only autonomous agents.
Literally the first "informal guidelines" (subject to change of course) states:
> Projects who have an active community that cares about and maintains the software
You can use LLMs for development + fulfill this requirement, contrary to popular belief.
They want to get rid of slop projects and vibe coders, not any project that has any developer that used any LLM. But again, requires you to read through the actual text to actually get their intention here.
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/commit/96fac426a32d1ba...
I have read it. This effectively narrows down the use of AI drastically IMO. Which is what I said.
This effectively limits it to stuff like code completion and using it as a chat assistant and doing some medium level refactors.
They should have just completely banned it. As the ambiguity itself causes problems. Even if you use LLMs maybe say 25% of the time, sooner or later that means that a significant portion of your code base is AI generated.
> They want to get rid of slop projects and vibe coders, not any project that has any developer that used any LLM. But again, requires you to read through the actual text to actually get their intention here.
I am not a vibe coder (I am a software dev with almost 20 years experience) and am using Heavy LLM assistance (I am running Qwen 3.8 locally) for some of my projects. I am making sure the code output is decent, well documented, has tests etc. Sure what I am doing is something betweeen "vibe coding" and "proper development" but there would be no way for me in the few hours an evening to even get to the stage I would be at in some of them without LLM assistance.
I would not be able to use codeberg for hosting my project under their rules.
As a random example, AI generated content is banned from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages subreddit and any regular visitor that _isn't_ suffering from AI psychosis/FOMO will tell you it's for the better. In general it's not that difficult to moderate for it either as AI built projects consistently contain the same patterns _over and over_ such that 98% is easily detected.
That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).
However Codeberg actual "fuzzy" policy is less strict than "no LLM used ever".
> projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
And "mostly" here seems egregiously undefined to me
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
Is this "mostly developed with AI" in your opinion? Not to mention the fact the policy leaves it open to interpretation is part of the problem...
But still, we wouldn't be allowed to use codeberg because "generative ai" was used significantly for most lines of code?
and yet we seem to be convinced that English is the appropriate spec language of the modern times
That sentence seems to lack an important word. Microsoft is a company so I don't assume they built an alternative for it. Microsoft 365 is what used to be called Office 365 and governments love their Office suite so that would make sense and I could see the number accidentally getting dropped but NixOS is probably an OS so I guess this is about Microsoft Windows but then it just means they're replacing one OS with another and Windows-compatibility (nor Office suite compatibility for that matter) is hardly a novel idea.
The site doesn't seem to have much information about this headline at a glance. Does anyone have a link to the missing context?
The German Defense sector did something with Nextcloud, Collabora Online, Open-Xchange, Element/Matrix and Univention Nubus I believe. With things like Euro-Office and Nextcloud really stepping things up. Even Proton getting an office suite, I don't think the M365 platform is the big hurdle it once was. Especially because Microsoft lost the private market. 25 years ago you'd get employees who knew how to use Microsoft Office, today they all grew up with Macs, Chromebooks and similar.
What is the alternative though? If you piss off Trump you risk getting all your digital infrastructure shut down over night. It doesn't even have to be you who pisses him off. Obviously using Anthropic AI service has it's own issues within the EU trade zone, but it's been what... 3 months? Since they were ordered to shut off EU access to their most powerful models because they ran afoul of the US government.
They don't need to reimplement all of MS Office, just the parts they need to serve their constituency.
How do you think currencies are established? By accepting chickens and cows in lieu of legal tender? That’s precisely the meaning of legal tender. This is the exact analogue thereof: information is required as value is required, information and value are required in a mandated standardised form, other forms are rejected a priori.
Sure, the government could force a format change if they really want to.
LibreOffice Sheets doesn’t compete with Excel 2024, it competes more with Excel 2003. Granted, this is fine for a lot of (most?) people but it’s still not a “replacement” in my mind.
I ended up just building a Nix Flake to properly run Excel. At least then the operating system itself isn’t MS.
I think the only way we can actually solve the problem is to get a FOSS product up to snuff with Excel. I use Julia if I need really elaborate number crunching, but I don’t view it as a substitute for Excel; the interactivity of spreadsheets is really useful, especially when you’re actively developing stuff.
It supports Office 365 and Office 2024 Home works as of about two days ago.
I think it would require very little if any effort to get Home and Business working but the license for that was too expensive (though pull requests are welcome!)
Currently limited to stuff that can be activated on Microsoft’s website. I tried very hard and was ultimately unsuccessful at getting Office 2024 Pro Plus working from a gray-market key I bought on Groupon, because the MAK activation stuff appears to depend on a lot of stuff that Wine/Proton doesn’t implement. Again, pull requests are welcome if someone here figures out how to do it.
Valve is making desktop computers now; maybe the next thing they could improve is LibreOffice to try and appeal to businesses.
Even without the VBA though, it’s missing basically any feature added in 2019 like Lambda and filter and dynamic arrays.
I wouldn’t consider myself a power user, I would say I am a “high level basic user”, and even I have noticed the shortcomings. And this is also coming from a dude who very much wants a FOSS thing to succeed over Microsoft.
But that's not all. Avoiding US based proprietary tools, in general, is going to be a challenge. The EU needs some kind of fund to create the next generation of productivity tools for this platform. Not just equivalent replacements. Requirements change and new tools need to be different.
I would much prefer to be using something like NixOS and not be depending on Microsoft etc but I can't imagine what the stack will look like if we don't revolutionise the work. Sensitivity labels, DLP, etc. are relics of people treating information on computers as if they are physical documents, and I can't see how I will have been paying for BP/E3/E5 licenses for users and then suddenly start to argue we don't need those features anymore after spending so long insisting users need to use them.
My framework laptop, my NAS, my Home-assistant, etc
It’s how I’ve always envisioned “systems management”, but the struggle has been real.
Enter LLM’s - the barriers are kind of gone!
It’s actually making so much sense I don’t know where to start.
Just try it out, using a little bit of LLM support and you can reach a solid-state like setup for servers and workstations.
1. The rigidness of it all, which after a while is the main point ofc. Takes getting used to, but awesomeness for servers
2. The highly specialized filesystem layout requires some tinkering when trying to “just get things to work” that is not already packaged/wrapped for nixos
3. The language is… special. An acquired taste perhaps.
4. Flakes, home-manager, experimental flags galore.
LLM’s makes short work of it all, and having a devenv.sh setup of all your projects is :chefs-kiss:
My machines are essentially solid-state devices, and it all just becomes extremely predictable and stable.
The primitives for packaging in nix feel exactly like what they should be. When you look at a definition, the things that piece of code could do in principle (and things you could do with it as a consumer) tend to cleanly match it's semantic purpose and its responsibilities. So a lot of things are self-documenting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mqVnyOTeN8
TLDW:
- Nix needs weird tricks to make its packaging scheme work
- The main repo is uncurated and hosted on Github
- The functional nature of packages means a low level update can either trigger a huge wave of updates or you end up with out of date deps. Usually both happen at the same time
If you have a single machine and only use stuff from the official nixpkgs, there are no more struggles than any other linux distro, this is a very happy path (imo).
Going outside of that you will, practically, need to convert to using flakes. The conversion is easy, but its another learning curve and there are conflicting docs. Agents make short work of this.
Packaging things yourself can get quite hairy. For simple projects in a single well supported language its easy and just a couple lines of code. For a rust+wasm+solidjs+vite+julia+more monorepo, it was a couple of weeks on a steep learning curve. Agents are pretty okay at packaging in general, I've been able to oneshot a number of difficult-for-me packaging problems, other times it can be an unmitigated mess.
For remote deploys, secrets management, and other devops-like tasks, things get harder, but most people don't need/want this and if you make it this far the remaining learning curve is totally worth it.
They also have "Mijn Bureau" which I tried out and wrote about here [0] which is the MS Office alternative.
I take it this is the layer below that, an operating system?
But it all looks quite fragmented still from what I can see, especially now that it's also split across GitHub and CodeBerg as well as being split across different organizations, and trying to collaborate with other efforts by other European countries while still remaining distinct.
[0] https://techstackups.com/articles/is-it-feasible-to-self-hos...
[1] https://github.com/MinBZK/mijn-bureau-infra
[2] https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO/src/branch/main/compone...
I wonder if Claude could go from NixOS spec to actual config without the Nixos provider. The provider becomes a natural language description and some links to the docs/source code and then a verifier is all you need.
I think NixOS would be a great solution for this sort of environment. With something like impermanence enabled to make the systems immutable, you could push all configuration from a central server and ensure that there is no drift. You could even use read-only nix stores served over nfs. This would all be easier if your hardware is limited to a few select configurations, of course.
My thoughts, ignoring my technical disagreements, would be that you'd want to setup clients to have a specific set of software per their government role. A nix store could expose more software than you planned on supporting (e.g. forgotten software or licensed software).
A monolithic configuration may be adequate if each machine role only exposes the software that’s needed in its config. Other software that’s in the store could be hidden in some way, like overlay paths, perhaps. There may be other methods too. There’s a similar discussion here although this is about restricting paths via bubblewrap: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/restricting-nix-store-in-a-mou...
Most licensed software wouldn’t be an issue as long as the user doesn’t have license access, I’m assuming the license server would grant or deny access based on the user/user role. Depends on the software I guess.
I wonder if it’s possible to run a bubblewrapped (or similarly restricted) Wayland client and restrict access to store paths that way?
I hope you are paying them something.
Flakehub is one attempt at solving the discovery problem. For example: https://flakehub.com/flake/nix-community/disko?view=usage.
> DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals.
But fails to state what the letters in D.A.W.O. stand for
I'll happily try it.
No, that's still not enough complexity! They need at least a thousand agents using trillions of tokens around the clock to get us the Nix and Rust slop we need.
Now that's a fairly interesting project and a way to actually bring technology like NixOS to the administrators in the way they expect. From my experience (sample size one, yes) there are more systems administrators that use web interfaces for management than DevOps IaC folks. This would be a good bridging solution if it is a successful project.
[1] - https://members.dawo.community/en/blog/blog-1/dawo-nixos-wor...
What I'd love to see is a 5 year follow up to one of these stories. What worked, what didn't, how many people are still using the linux OS, etc. Because I feel like windows is as entrenched as always in the government space, whereas in the corporate world most people I know have migrated to macs long ago.
YouTube: What's Left? with Jovan and Freddie - AI Apocalypse Isn't Happening. This is Worse — Cory Doctorow
* typical deployments
* training/consulting
* compliance with Ditch regulations
* shared infrastructure for custom builds, and CVEs
As for the third item - that's not answering my question, it's a homunculus answer: What could the Netherlands have regulated that requires making changes to NixOS? Which NixOS maintainers themselves could not oblige?
I'm sure NixOS can provide those, but rather than each department figure out how to do that, organisations try to centralize figuring this out: which packages and configuration satisfies the requirements.
One of the items discusses MFA. Organisations will want to standardise on exactly which MFA devices they provide and support.
$ alias '#'='dsh --profile headless'Are they going with Copilot for Dutchies or Kaaskoppen.NET?
Which is always granted.
Unless its mandatory, it's just theater.
My follow up opinion is that Satya agrees with me, and that is why he has so much anxiety around AI.
> Things that cost somebody hours, written down so they cost the next person minutes. Each one is here because it actually happened, not because it might.
> Same commit, different answer, decided by the runner's store rather than by the code.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS/src/branch/main/d...
> 10 dead inputs were pruned (audit); these 15 are load-bearing and next up for the mirror pass.
https://codeberg.org/DAWO/DAWO-Core/src/commit/4db976f05c508...
Is there anyone doing MDM or policy enforcement on Linux other than Google Workspace + chromebooks?
Nix happens to also set you up with a working build environment so if a program doesn't expose the necessary options to manage it the way you want, I bet Codex would have no trouble patching it as part of your nix config.
It takes three really nice and cleverly designed things that are all very easy to use separately. Then you put those things into the hands of smart, bored and slightly undercompensated people and divide those people into four separate departments so they don't ever talk with each other.
Then you introduce a fourth thing into the mix, let it ferment for a while and make sure some people dealing with the first three leave the building and are replaced with total imbeciles who have no idea what they are doing and also never say no to any silly idea of their boss.
Then you ask to change something. Anything really. And it for some magical reason unbeknown to anybody involved at this point takes a few years.
Minimum password lengths, maximum screen saver delay, screen saver password requirement, disk crypto enforcement, a million other little things. All of them can be done by customizing linux sure but organizations won’t want to maintain a separate distro for each business unit that needs different policies.
It's basically what people think they want from Docker but don't actually get from Docker.
2. Because Guix is less mature and more, ehm, opinionated, than *ix + nixpkgs
Guix on paper really sounds ideal, it feels like a more compelling design, more first principles, it's all scheme, really exciting ideas under the hood. But design intent is not a substitute for the actual user experience. IRL it's too much hassle: weak package coverage, weak ecosystem, a steep learning curve, most stuff will require work because it was designed around systemd.
Now NixOS on the other hand already has an abundance of packages and real adoption. Most setups can probably migrate to nix today with a backup of /home and a competent LLM agent, and things "will just work". I did this recently!
Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even). You can do complex things, and your rig or network could explode and it won't matter cause you can rebuild and deploy to a new/repaired machine in minutes. Your backups could explode and all you'd lose is state.
All that is easy to have in Nix today - I know cause I literally just switched and did most of it with like 0 experience. I migrated my fairly complex setup 1 to 1 and gained a ton of useful stuff in Nix, whereas with Guix it wasn't even possible (I would have to trim or package / translate tons of stuff), nor would it have been easy, and all the cool stuff I gained with nix is either difficult or non-existent on guix, let alone mature.
I agree with Guix, the whole package really appeals to me. I found the same issues between Nix vs Guix, having to do a lot more fiddling to get to where i wanted to be.
Guess next time I will word my statements better :)
Guix on paper really sounds ideal, it feels like a more compelling design, more first principles, it's all scheme, really exciting ideas under the hood. But design intent is not a substitute for the actual user experience. IRL it's too much hassle: weak package coverage, weak ecosystem, a steep learning curve, most stuff will require work because it was designed around systemd.
Now NixOS on the other hand already has an abundance of packages and real adoption. Most setups can probably migrate to nix today with a backup of /home and a competent LLM agent, and things "will just work". I did this recently!
Add to that the NixOS ecosystem where things are fairly simple to setup declaratively and "it just works": disko for partitions, sops-nix for secrets, restic for cloud backups, microvm for light vm's, NixOS anywhere or deploy-rs for deployments (colmena or nixops4 for interconnected nodes even). You can do complex things, and your rig or network could explode and it won't matter cause you can rebuild and deploy to a new/repaired machine in minutes. Your backups could explode and all you'd lose is state.
All that is easy to have in Nix today - I know cause I literally just switched and did most of it with like 0 experience. I migrated my fairly complex setup 1 to 1 and gained a ton of useful stuff in Nix, whereas with Guix it wasn't even possible (I would have to trim or package / translate tons of stuff), nor would it have been easy, and all the cool stuff I gained with nix is either difficult or non-existent on guix, let alone mature.
www.dawo.community took too long to respond.
"What DAWO stands for
DAWO brings public values and technology together. The community pursues five primary goals."
I know it's been said before, but why tf does Claude insist on writing in Reverse Polish notation?
Not by your choosing, but still.
I am in favor of more options, always
From a user perspective, KDE Plasma or GNOME are simple environments to work in. Most stuff is on the web these days anyway; even a locked down kiosk setup would probably be adequate for many users.
No average office worker will be fiddling with Nix configs or installing Windows software. That’s for IT.
So while more alternatives here are the logical answer, as well as eliminate the greedy US corpoations, I am not sure NixOS as it is right now is ideal. On paper, NixOS should solve EVERYTHING. For instance, if a build status works for one user, the environment guarantee should mean it works for EVERYONE ELSE. Same with other problems and hardware, so in theory, NixOS should be perfect.
In practice, though, I found working with NixOS annoying, for many reasons. A static system that has issues, is not good. A static system that restricts me in problem solving, is not good. Plus, Nix is ugly to no ends - I have no idea why the NixOS team thought a new programming language is required. Why do I need to define static elements in Nix? Why not make that more free form? I already describe my whole system via yaml files, which in turn ruby uses to generate everything I need. Then there are smaller issues, like why do I need to use systemd on NixOS, why can I not used versioned AppDirs with a name scheme similar to GoboLinux (hashed program directories on NixOS are, of course, also versioned app-dirs, but I hate reading 7897389nughuewz789gewh2t93h923-hghwugeiw73, that simply tells me nothing. Why not have /Programs/Python/3.15.0/ ? It can't be simpler than that.)
Anyway - good for the Netherlands to push here, Denmark, Sweden, Finland will also push, even France, though slower. Now please everyone, help us convince the german government to stop being such a tool for Trump. Merz is a failure anyway, but the problems go far deeper than merely Trump, and with the AfD going to seize power, idiocy will again dominate in Germany. That's very bad. Germany is soooooooo slow here. Microsoft even managed to kill LiMux years ago. They have placed their economic hitmen in Germany, so the whole EU does not work anyway because Germany will keep on dragging every other country down. It is thus very understandable why real innovation comes from the smaller countries in the EU, as they are quicker to innovate. Unfortunately the big german behemoth will roll over them and again cripple many required things in the EU.
Microsoft isn't what it used to be. Maybe soon it will be called Microsoft/OpenAI, then OpenAI/Microsoft, then just OpenAI.
It's a bad sign that they chose NixOS instead of something boring like Debian, though (and it seems France, too.) Makes me suspect that this is being driven by a single strong personality who will eventually lose interest or even rugpull support, leaving the project in disarray and a poster child for criticizing doing anything but buying Microsoft as European flakiness. On the other hand, I'm happy that it will involve money being put into NixOS.
I talk about small businesses mostly, starting with ten or twenty computers, zero config, bonjour discovery, download apps from the app store, for me it looks like a total winner
Microsoft or Linux don't offer such an easy path to productivity, so why is it? What is lacking? What needs to be done in order for that scenario to work? What roadblock have you hit when trying to implement it?
We all use apple products, iMacs, Macbooks, and if we start a business for sure we as CEOs or managers will use one on our desktops, so why? Genuinely interested in answers...
https://www.jamf.com/blog/debate-over-ibm-confirms-that-macs...
What businesses need is management services and business applications. Those exist for Apple as well, but two significant headwinds: 1) inertia of essentially every major business on earth using MS Active Directory means there are enormous support and ecosystem benefits, and 2) cost.
IME, Okta is almost as popular as MS AD now, I think they have 30% market share compared to 40% for AD, with IBM and others taking up the rest.
> why more businesses don't rely on Apple products knowing the simplicity of just buying an iMac and adding some apps to it?
Apple is a US company first and foremost and US has become unreliable. It has nothing to do with simplicity or productivity if reliability is in question. What use is a Mac if it can be subject to US sanctions resulting in App Store being shutdown for you or your entire Country and apps/services stop working overnight?
I definitely like that future, but it should be built now
Doing well in Australia and New Zealand too. Aside from Taco the only big headwind is memory.
Here issue is not of whether Apple is reliable or not. Issue is unreliability of USA. If US Government decides Apple Store should be banned in Country X, Apple cannot do anything about it but abide by the decree.
However, a lot of apps are unstable. Support is horrible to non existent for some. No refunds even when the app doesn't work at all directly after install. Most professional apps have a buy price AND a subscription price at this point. Most actually working apps are not apple exclusive these days.
It's definitely not as green over there as some apple people make it out to be.
I still like my iPad. The pen is amazing, and the sound is so good I use it as TV without extra speakers in my caravan. but I usually don't recommend it to anyone. Especially no one that has any form of fixed budget.
I would probably just get a cheap old one if I had known that I won't use most music/3d software on it anyway. I wouldn't have spent so much extra for the big hard drive, etc.