I am not an Arch-user, but I would say so. At least Nix itself claims that their unstable channel is the largest and most up-to-date package repository currently followed by AUR. So yes, I think you can have best of both worlds - a rock solid base system with the newest software via Nix. It even gets better with Home Manager.

The Mac hardware does limit the choice of distributions a bit. Besides that I can highly recommend Debian 12 as a rock solid base system with Nix as package manager to get latest and greatest software. Actually the nice thing is that you can use Nix package manager on any Linux distribution.

I have been using Firefox ever since. Never really had a reason to switch to something else.

To maybe give you some ideas, have a look at SimpleX and the Nostr. I haven’t looked into it in detail yet, but at first glance these two seem to work similarly.

Actually there’s an idea sparking up on me.

When I was a junior programmer there were some business guys coming up with the requirement to implement their own validation language (similar to regex). I always thought it is totally stupid to invent your own instead of using something that already exists. But it turned out to be great fun implementing it. I had no prior knowledge in implementing parsers and interpreters. But man I was so proud after I came up with my own solution for the problem. It was such fun, that I even was doing over hours. At the end I create my own tokenizer, a parser and an interpreter. Even something similar to what I now know most people would call an AST (abstract syntax tree).

However, I know I have bought the Crafting Interpreters book without having read it. I really should start digging into it.

Yea doing some FOSS contributions definitely was something I always was considering. But then as soon as I was looking for the right project things started to get complicated again. And even if you find a cool project you look into the issue list and imposter-syndrome starts kicking in.

I don’t want to hear how good this game is because I only own a PS5 and don’t have a gaming PC.

When I had a look on it a while ago they didn’t support Docker Compose. But except this it’s a drop in replacement.

Properly just Process Manager with the icon from macOS Activity Monitor.

Creating a snapshot is not the backup itself. It is basically freezing the current state of your files from this point on and then remembering what has chanced compared to the snapshot. So yes, it is normal that this takes no time since nothing is copied on your hard drive. If you want to backup the snapshot you need to make an actual backup of it. This is possible with btrfs. But since I haven’t done it yet, I can’t tell you the exact command.

I use Reeder on iOS and Mac.

I quickly tried out Fedora and was very surprised how good it is. Just wondering how the fact that RHEL plans to go closed source will impact Fedora in the long term. Do you know?

Absolutely. wezterm is so good.

Yes, that limited number of included searches is my only criticism I have with Kagi. They are aware of this, and are trying to offer customers more searches for the same price by improving their costs. I am glad they decided to do this by reducing their costs and have decided to not go the road of monetizing their users by selling ads and customer data.

However, I try to use Kagi only for serious search requests. For other very trivial searches, I use Startpage. For me, works OK. But I hope that one day Kagi offers enough searches, so I can just use it everywhere as my default search engine without having to thinking about it.

Kagi. Very happy with it. Best $5 it recently invested. Gives me much better results than Google and all the others.

Germany, yes we do drink water without boiling it directly from the tap. Tap water must in general have drinking water quality across the country. However, even it may not be a health risk, some people don’t like the taste. Where I live, it tastes very good.

Problem is that this kind of alternative web interfaces for Google are just going web scraping of the regular www.google.com page. They are not using the Google Search API (which is paid and requires an API key). However, Google says scraping of their search results is not allowed. And they are actually preventing it by blocking IPs doing too many search request in certain amount of time. That is the main reason a lot of Searx or SearxNG instances stop working after a certain time.

I didn’t know Discord also has a weird CEO?!

Companies are also banning ChatGPT because its unclear from where the code it spits out was stolen and how it’s licensed. Copy and pasting code from AI tools is an enormous legal risk for a software company.

I do understand that if companies running ad-supported models, they need to make sure users are actually watching those ads. Seems logically to me - no ads mean no money, and no money means no sustainable business model.

On the other side, as a user, I just can’t browse the internet without an ad-blocker any more. They just got so annoying and sometimes even break the actual website.

But to be honest, I don’t see an alternative to ad-supported models except paying money directly via subscriptions plans etc. But this also will not work in the long term. I just can’t pay afford to pay a subscription for each website I visit during the day.