Extension modules are implemented in C because the interpreter is written in C. If it were written in another language, folks would write extension modules for that language instead. Also, it would be less relevant if people used portable C bindings like cffi, which are portable to PyPy and other interpreters… but they don’t.

You tried to apply far too much pressure over too large a surface area. Either make a more focused approach by not chasing Free Software and XMPP supremacy at the same time, or find ambient ways to give people options without forcing them to make choices in the direction you want. In particular, complaining about bridges usually doesn’t get the discussion to a useful place; instead, try showing people on the other side of the bridge how wonderful your experience is.

Also, I get that you might not personally like IRC, but you need to understand its place in high-reliability distributed systems before trying to replace it; the majority of them use IRC instead of XMPP for their disaster recovery precisely because its protocol jankiness makes it easier to wield in certain disaster situations.

Show your list of packages or shut the fuck up already.

I’m the only one talking to you. You’ve convinced nobody else that you’re even worth speaking to. Honestly, you sound like the weenie who tried to publish that bootlicking pro-military letter. Wanna go be the second person to sign it? You certainly aren’t doing anything worthwhile with your time here on Lemmy.

You claim you have a list of packages, but you’ve revealed none of them. This is somewhere between the angry politician waving a list of enemies and the dishonest teenager claiming to have a romantic partner in terms of convincing me. Look, you have the time to write something like fifty Lemmy comments per month; I think that you can write the twenty or thirty lines of Nix required to build your pet package. It’s a shitty carpenter who blames their power tools and a shitty scientist who makes empirical claims without evidence.

The nixpkgs community has been operating and maintaining nixpkgs-update since 2018. Earlier in the thread, you were shown the infamous Repology graph; it’s also linked from the nixpkgs-update documentation. We already have a concerted plan to offer the freshest ports tree in the world and are executing on it. If your particular pet package isn’t available, then contribute it yourself and the bot will ensure that it stays fresh and updated.

I use the community impermanence flake instead of ZFS or btrfs. It’s still fairly nice; I actually like knowing that stuff like ~/.cache doesn’t persist anywhere on disk, even in snapshots. It does require a lot of careful thought, like e.g. which parts of the persistent disk need to be backed up locally.

Do it yourself. Contributing to nixpkgs is easy, especially for updating packages.

By induction, that will only make your user base stupider.

They have two. If the complaint is that neither wiki is as rich as the Gentoo or Arch wiki, consider that perhaps NixOS users don’t need as much supplementary advice for configuring their systems.

It’s been two decades. What kinks do you think NixOS has yet to iron out?

Search the manual for support32Bit configuration options, like hardware.opengl.support32Bit, hardware.pulseaudio.support32Bit, or services.pipewire.alsa.support32Bit. Any 32-bit games, as well as Steam itself, will need these to get their GL and PA/ALSA libraries set up properly.

You may also want to look up what programs.nix-ld.enable does, although I hear that there’s a better harness builtin as of NixOS 24.05.

All that said, everything Just Worked when I last tried. I haven’t run Steam in a while, though. I do use Retroarch and OBS without problems, though, streaming PS4 speedruns to Youtube or Peertube, and that all works out-of-box.

It has nothing to do with knowing the language and everything to do with what’s outside of the language. C hasn’t resembled CPUs for decades and can’t be reasonably retrofitted for safety.

Your hands and wrists must not hurt yet. You’ll eventually come to see writing code as tedium.

Other way around, actually; C was one of several languages proposed to model UNIX without having to write assembly on every line, and has steadily increased in abstraction. Today, C is specified relative to a high-level abstract machine and doesn’t really resemble any modern processing units’ capabilities.

Incidentally, coming to understand this is precisely what the OP meme is about.

C’mon, I think you have better reading comprehension than that. He’s a professional data scientist specializing in machine learning. He went to grad school, then to big industry, then to startups, and is currently running a consultancy. He is very clearly not “on the side of the road.” He’s merely telling executives to fuck off with their AI grift.

It’s the other way around. Nix sucks. (Guix sucks too.) However, every other build system I’ve used, as well as every other package manager and every other distro, sucks more.

You’re doing fine. Slow down. Forget “installation”; it’s not a concept Nix uses. If jumping directly to NixOS is overwhelming, it might be easier to go back to Arch, Ubuntu, or something else you know and are comfortable with, and use Nix from a familiar distro; build up idioms for working with your preferred tools, development environments, and configuration. When you’re ready, you can try NixOS again, and hopefully it will make more sense.

nix-env must evaluate all of nixpkgs and the reference implementation of Nix is not very fast. It’s not a big mystery, although it appears that a rewrite of Nix will be required to improve it.

Sarcasm needs to be humorous; you’re merely rattling off insults. Anyway, it’s pretty uncommon that somebody literally “can’t contribute code;” anybody who can learn how to use a computer and post juvenile horseshit to Lemmy can learn how to write code. I’m a former professional musician; writing code is my backup career, taking less practice and effort than playing the piano. I encourage you to try putting in some effort; for the same time it takes to write around 500 comments/month on Lemmy, you could probably build a program that automates or simplifies some portion of your life.

And seriously, by doubling down on the idea that being Neanderthal is bad or deficient, you’re spouting some nasty rhetoric. It doesn’t matter whether you’re serious or not; eventually, you’ll forget that you were being ironic. “Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword” and all that.