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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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I don’t know what gave you the idea that a particular distro would be an especially good/bad choice for privacy, etc. They’re all GNU/Linux with only minor differences in compile-time options in the kernel and different defaults in user-space. But they’re just that, defaults. You can reconfigure them to your preference.
With that out of the way, the issue NixOS attempts to address is reproducibility. You get a central configuration infrastructure that defines everything, from partition layout, through user creation and package installation to software configuration. The central idea being that migrating to a new machine or setting up a new development environment should only take a few commands.
What you do with that is up to you. You can barricade the whole system if you like. The defaults are sane, but not overly focused on privacy, etc.
Also it’s quite a learning curve as the documentation/wiki is incomplete and/or outdated.
The wiki is not even recommended, since some time already nobody has access to the wiki, even to put a banner “stay away, everything is not working and outdated”
So we have to piece information together from the manual and random blogs? Like cavemen? Or worse, like Windows users??
The Matrix room is the recommended channel of support
I personally think it’s a bit a waste of somebody’s time to always sit there and reply
Also, when you start understanding how this stuff works, you can start using github’s search code so you can find snippets of code and make your own (or just look at the packages’ code, it’s very basic inside)
Ah, and forgot to mention because it’s too obvious, nixpkgs search, this is basically all you need for free movement inside “nixverse”
Yeah Nix documentation kind of sucks right now. There are like a 10 different ways to set-up flakes
Not to mention that they’re still considered experimental.
And entirely optional.
Obviously
No, not obviously.
People new to Nix/NixOS always seem to think that flakes are some kind of fundamental shift or something and if you don’t use flakes, you’re not going to be ready for the future or whatever.
No, they’re not. They’re “just” a standardised method of composing separate Nix projects.
In the most common NixOS case (and especially when starting out) you have exactly one external Nix project you depend on and that’s Nixpkgs. Flakes provide very little (if any) benefit in this specific case.
If you’re starting out, you don’t need to care one bit about flakes, experimental features and the documentation of features that are not intended to be commonly used yet (especially not for beginners).