Ahhh nice, I have thought about trying out Kakoune as it supports plugins. Do you use many plugins/find them useful?

Helix does have a pipe command also.

Yeah I agree, I like that aspect too!

I use Helix

TLDR: Yes I think helix is worth trying out. It has some missing features but it is an amazing piece of software.

Yes I use helix daily. It is very fun to use and you can do many things faster. It is particularly good when navigating a (large) codebase you know fairly well. You are able to jump around and find/edit relevant code very quickly.

Compared to vs code:

• it is much faster and more minimal
• It might be harder to get things up and running than in vs code, e.g. to get auto-completion working in helix you need to have the LSP for that language installed. It can be a bit confusing if you have never done it before but it is easy once you have done it a few times.

Compared to neovim I think it is:

• easier to learn
• slightly faster - especially with large files
• you will have a much smaller/simpler configuration. AFAIK Helix has more features working out of the box than neovim (file picker, lsp support ect) and needs less configuration to get things to a workable state.

The downside of helix compared to both neovim and vscode is that it does not have plugin support yet so you will need to use other tools in combination with it to get an equivalent experience. Here are some tools that are commonly used with helix:

• yazi - terminal file manager
• gitui or lazygit - terminal git user interface
• zellij - terminal pane manager

Helix really shines when:

• performance matters - I have edited files with millions of lines and had no trouble on codebases where my colleagues IDE’s become very slow.
• You want to use multiple cursors at times
• You want a simple or no configuration
• It is taking too long to learn the vim keybindings - vim keybindings are more concise but less intuitive and harder to learn

I recommend you use the tutor (hx --tutor) for a few minutes each day to learn the keybidings.

https://snowflakeos.org/ - this project is focused on building an easier version of nixos including a GUI software store based on gnome software.

edit:ooops I meant to respond to @onlinepersona@programming.dev here

anything I tried getting from their repos was always way further behind the mac OS homebrew or Debian apt versions.

Nixpkgs are the most up to date of any package respiratory source

It is likely that you were using the current ‘stable’ channel that does not have the very latest packages. The ‘unstable’ channel does have the very latest packages and is what I think most people use.

nixOS is really slick in concept, but has a steep learning curve to get it properly customized as a daily driver. The learned skills don’t really translate outside the nix realm either, so I decided it was too much effort for my use case. I love this concept as a way to build reproducable servers or workstations tho, so I’ll def be playing with it again.

I totally agree, I wish it was easier to learn.

You should check out zig, its compiler can even be used for c/c++. If you have time to listen to an interview, this developer voices interview on zig explains some of the advantages of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_oqWE9otaE&t=3970s

It worked for me with just: virtualisation.libvirtd.enable = true; in the configuration.nix.

Stable channels provide conservative updates for fixing bugs and security vulnerabilities, but do not receive major updates after initial release.

If you want up to date packages then use the unstable channel.

Nix has the most unique packages and the most up to date packages of any Linux software repository. It has substantially more fresh packages than Arch or Alpine (which you say does a better job in a separate comment).

Source:https://repology.org/repositories/graphs

object oriented

Python does have OOP but you are not at all forced to use it. You can write code in a functional or even procedural style.

typing

I do hate that python doesent have proper support for typing but I think weakly typed variables will actually help beginners as it is less to think about to start off with.

indentation

I think there are pros and cons here. In other languages it is considered good style to use indentation anyway.

I’m sure it is difficult to teach a large class like that though. It was hard enough for me to learn with a much more favourable teacher to student ratio than you probably have. Sorry but honestly I do sympathise with admin as well.

How often do you run nixos-rebuild --switch?

If you don’t run it regularly then you will likely be waiting for a few different packages to get updates. To fix this you can configure auto upgrades:https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Automatic_system_upgrades

I have definitely found it challenging at times to do even simple things. I think it does get easier over time.

I really hope the new user experience will improve. Once the issues with flakes are fixed and they are no longer experimental I would expect flakes to replace the other ways of doing things. This will hopefully make the documentation more concise/focused/better. It might also mean more people start using nix/flakes which will surface more of these problems to be fixed.

I think people need to decide if the benefits they are getting are worth the challenges. I personally really like the reproducibility and the massive amount of packages available from one place. On other distros I have used things have ended up breaking eventually and I have had to re-install things and search for fixes. But on NixOs things keep working.

“I’m playing both sides, so that I always come out on top”

Most is described here (the author probably has some amount of bias but this is the only summary I know of): https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

Other than that some very active contributors resigned as maintainers in support of the open letters.

And it seems now that the community members in support of the open letters/changes have convinced the board of the foundation to agree on some things.

What is the app?

Could you link to the Lemmy style app please, I haven’t heard of this before

You can install alternative android distros on an android phone that will keep updating long after the manufacturer has stopped. For example lineage OS which supports lots of devices (but not all).

There are also Linux distros targeted to mobile devices.

You just need to pick a device that is supported when buying.

Discourse and Lemmy are both based around topics/communities so hopefully there will be better federation here. E.g. being able to follow a discourse topic from lemmy would be really cool.

Hopefully they have done this in a way where Lemmy can federate with then easily.

We can already view mastodon threads that are linear inside Lemmy.

Oh, sorry. It wasn’t for me earlier (I linked through from Firefox suggestions)