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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If you don’t already know the benefits it’s unlikely it solves a problem you have.

    Even among its users many are using it because it’s cool rather than because they actually need it.

    It’s a declarative system, meaning you can describe how it should be setup (using a magic strings you have to look up online) and then it “sets up itself” according to the description.

    It’s normally something you’d use for mass and/or repetitive deployments.

    It’s usefulness for a single system is debatable, considering you can achieve very close to 100% of “reproducibility” anyway by copying /home and /etc and fetching a copy of the package list.

    Where the prescriptive approach is supposed to help is when you attempt to reproduce the system a long time later, after things like config files and packages have changed. But it doesn’t help with /home, it hasn’t been tested over long intervals, and in fact nobody guarantees long term compatibility for Nix state.













  • Windows and DOS games started working well later, as WINE and DOS emulator were evolving.

    But Linux had a thriving gaming scene of its own:

    • You’ve already mentioned Loki who made native ports.
    • Another type of “ports” were game engines made from scratch that used the level files of the original, games like Doom, Transport Tycoon, Caesar III, Panzer General, Stunts, ReVolt etc. You had to own the game files but the executable was FOSS.
    • There were lots of cool native games, many shooters (Warsow , Nexuiz, Cube, Tremulous), strategy games, cool arcade games (Tux Racer, Atomic Worm, H-Craft, Droid Assault), the rogue genre which debuted on UNIX and had tons of variants and so on.

    I’m only a casual gamer so this is just stuff I ran across occasionally, there was probably more.



  • Why do you want to use Shouko? Yeah it can bulk-tag anime but it doesn’t necessarily do a better job than Jellyfin with AniDB plugin. Also, it tends to hammer their API like an idiot and will get your user temp-banned or even perma-banned (depending on the size of your collection), while the Jellyfin plugin has rate limits.

    I used it once when I was moving my collection to Jellyfin and I barely got my account back.

    I would strongly suggest using just the regular Jellyfin plugins and adding titles to the directory in small batches and taking breaks if it stops recognizing them because it means the API is throttling you.



  • For me, educational stuff was all windows with a small amount of macs and I don’t think I ever saw a Linux system in actual use anywhere.

    Linux systems started being common in CompSci schools around mid-90s, around the time LAMP took off (fun fact, Apache, MySQL and PHP were all launched in 1995).

    Previously in CompSci you’d get to use all kinds of UNIX servers. My uni still had Solaris servers with dumb terminals, and I got my first sysadmin certification on SCO.UNIX / OpenServer.