Bored. Give me a good "Living room PC" distro
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I daily drive NixOS and use it in many other situations. However, I'm also a systems engineer and it's the distro I use for managing all the environments.
I'm sure it was a joke(ish), but definitely not for the light-hearted or fairweather penguins.
Please tell me more about your work and how you use Nix in it. I'm interested.
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That appears to be hardware, not a distro
Oh, sorry, my bad.
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LOVE Minisforum- but I'm looking for an interesting distro, not interesting hardware to run it on.
My bad, apologies.
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Please tell me more about your work and how you use Nix in it. I'm interested.
I can't tell if you're being serious or facetious
I assure you it isn't all that glorious, though, just a lot of configs. NixOS is just my favorite method of infrastructure-as-code, and in conjunction with
nixopsI can't imagine going back to anything else unless the project required it for some reason. Disaster recovery is simple, and testing/pushing config changes to hundreds of machines is almost too easy.I have a clunky set of configs, for self-hosting at home and small side-clients, I slapped together you can look at, but again it's not all that special and I wouldn't necessarily follow this for real production stuffs. It also doesn't utilize any of the fancy NixOS stuff, fairly basic and Docker heavy.
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dynebolic
Ooh neat there's one I've never heard of
it's not well known and has had some down time but has been around for more than 20 years.
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I think you misunderstood, hence the downvotes.
OP is asking what a good distro is for a media center PC, as in the PC's video output will be connected to the TV's video input. At which point Linux does not give two shits.
Sounds like you thought they wanted to stream/cast via some TV app or something, but that just sounds like a nightmare and I'm not sure that anyone would even want to try to do that. Just run Linux and use the TV as a big monitor, be done with smart TV garbage.
I didn't misunderstand anything. The downvotes are just from salty Linux users who think piracy tools are a direct replacement for streaming services.
A media center is nothing without streaming apps.
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Linux pretty much just doesn't work on TV. No platforms have Linux support, unfortunately.
Bazzite, Chimera, Nobara all have a pretty sweet SteamOS-like distro, if you're after gaming and have AMD GPU.
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My bad, apologies.
No worries, their machines rule, I have a bd790i motherboard!
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Points for something I've never tried.
I got openSUSE Leap. It's stable and reliable. My complaint is that I needed to go thru all the hoops to get all the media codecs I need to play what I want.
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Yes but we all know no one talks about Linux and is referring to Android.
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I can't tell if you're being serious or facetious
I assure you it isn't all that glorious, though, just a lot of configs. NixOS is just my favorite method of infrastructure-as-code, and in conjunction with
nixopsI can't imagine going back to anything else unless the project required it for some reason. Disaster recovery is simple, and testing/pushing config changes to hundreds of machines is almost too easy.I have a clunky set of configs, for self-hosting at home and small side-clients, I slapped together you can look at, but again it's not all that special and I wouldn't necessarily follow this for real production stuffs. It also doesn't utilize any of the fancy NixOS stuff, fairly basic and Docker heavy.
I am serious. I am a cloud engineer (glorified system admin for cloud + Linux VMs) and I'm still stuck on Ansible + Terraform (stuck isn't the right word, we are a RHEL and Alpine shop for our VMs and Containers and things work well enough). My friends in bigger companies are using Nix though, but I was always scared of the learning curve. I want to see clear benefits of using nix so I can push myself to actually learn it, which is why I asked. Thanks for the link.
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I am serious. I am a cloud engineer (glorified system admin for cloud + Linux VMs) and I'm still stuck on Ansible + Terraform (stuck isn't the right word, we are a RHEL and Alpine shop for our VMs and Containers and things work well enough). My friends in bigger companies are using Nix though, but I was always scared of the learning curve. I want to see clear benefits of using nix so I can push myself to actually learn it, which is why I asked. Thanks for the link.
Oh, sweet!
In that case, I highly recommend taking a look at some more real-world examples. That link is just something that makes self-hosting and small jobs more or less thoughtless for me.
Imagine all those config management tools built into your OS, and that's NixOS in a nutshell. There's obviously WAY more it can do if you look into creating your own derivations, or getting into the new-ish concept of Flakes.
Again, though,
nixopsis the thing that makes me continue to use it, besides just already knowing how to throw together a config in nix's syntax. The nixops tool basically allows you to federate all your systems, tag them, group them, and do anything under the sun with each machine (or several in batches). It's hard to get across in a simple text blurb.In my case (SaaS), imagine having 10 devs that all want their own dev environment that mirrors production within our VPN, then you need a beta and production environment for each client that licenses the app. Each environment has a couple databases, a few different APIs, some background scraper-type applications, and front-ends for everything. Some of that stuff can live on one machine, some needs to be alone and redundant. You can see how very quickly there's a lot of machines to keep track of.
Now I need to update a couple config pieces to match a new feature in the app itself. Well, all I gotta do is sort out the config, then run a couple nixops command to push to all the dev environments. When ready, do the same for beta, then do it for prod when the fat lady sings.
Being all within one ecosystem, focused on security hardening, is what I really like about it. Hopefully that wasn't too stream-of-consciousness for ya, lmao.
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Points for something I've never tried.
None. Move your living room to the forest and never look back. Be free.
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I am annoyed by the weird UX differences between Kodi and Jellyfin. I really want this to be a thing. I've got an N100 box running libreelec right now. I really want Bigscreen to work on x86. Just need to have patience.
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None. Move your living room to the forest and never look back. Be free.
But there's no memes out there!?
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I got openSUSE Leap. It's stable and reliable. My complaint is that I needed to go thru all the hoops to get all the media codecs I need to play what I want.
Glad you like it, not sure it's a fit for my lazy living room machine though.
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I would have thought open/libreElec would have worked.
other mentionables centered around media are AVLinux , Ubuntu studio, and dynebolic.
Batocera is nice too. It's half an emulation console and half Kodi. You can tell it to launch Kodi as default too. Whereas LibreElec is only Kodi with a limited gaming ability
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Oh, sweet!
In that case, I highly recommend taking a look at some more real-world examples. That link is just something that makes self-hosting and small jobs more or less thoughtless for me.
Imagine all those config management tools built into your OS, and that's NixOS in a nutshell. There's obviously WAY more it can do if you look into creating your own derivations, or getting into the new-ish concept of Flakes.
Again, though,
nixopsis the thing that makes me continue to use it, besides just already knowing how to throw together a config in nix's syntax. The nixops tool basically allows you to federate all your systems, tag them, group them, and do anything under the sun with each machine (or several in batches). It's hard to get across in a simple text blurb.In my case (SaaS), imagine having 10 devs that all want their own dev environment that mirrors production within our VPN, then you need a beta and production environment for each client that licenses the app. Each environment has a couple databases, a few different APIs, some background scraper-type applications, and front-ends for everything. Some of that stuff can live on one machine, some needs to be alone and redundant. You can see how very quickly there's a lot of machines to keep track of.
Now I need to update a couple config pieces to match a new feature in the app itself. Well, all I gotta do is sort out the config, then run a couple nixops command to push to all the dev environments. When ready, do the same for beta, then do it for prod when the fat lady sings.
Being all within one ecosystem, focused on security hardening, is what I really like about it. Hopefully that wasn't too stream-of-consciousness for ya, lmao.
Thank you for the note. I'm been cursing myself for not being able to provide my devs with something similar (they don't complain but I know it will make their lives easier). I will start nix from scratch if I learn it but nixops definitely seems like it can help because terraform isn't that great at the example you provided. Thanks.
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Thank you for the note. I'm been cursing myself for not being able to provide my devs with something similar (they don't complain but I know it will make their lives easier). I will start nix from scratch if I learn it but nixops definitely seems like it can help because terraform isn't that great at the example you provided. Thanks.
Some NixOS native packages and options change the defaults to be more security conscious rather than "easy to spin up." Doing a basic nginx config in NixOS will be more secure than if you had installed it through debian's apt or from source. Similar for ssh, you just don't have to think as much about doing those few obvious config changes you always have to do when spinning up a new machine. Of course, there are some things you have to customize for yourself (like custom ports, paths, etc.), but they make it a little simpler by assuming you're using NixOS in a production environment.
A couple of other links that you'll end up referencing all the time if you get into NixOS:
The first link is the native package repo, and the second link are all the NixOS config parameters for each of those packages and the system in general.
they don't complain but I know it will make their lives easier
Perfect. So when you do provide them with an efficiency boost when they never asked about it, you can be a rockstar and get a raise. Or keep it in your back pocket until they do complain and implement it then for a similar effect
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But there's no memes out there!?
The memes are the friends we made along the way
