This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
US: Let's sanction everyone everywhere all at once!
Also US: Why don't people want to be dependent on US systems? π
Yea we got a bit of the βinmates are running the asylumβ situation over here.
In the immortal words of the joker(paraphrased) this country needs an enema
we would lose about a third of our human biomass
Oh well
Couldn't undermine the country more if they tried, which makes one wonder.
Yep. Trump's actions are no different than what any bad actor would do if they wanted to destroy the USA without invading it.
Destroying what (appearance of) democracy they had as well
Finally. Been saying for years, NixOS is the obvious choice for a gov distro.
Now we need to convince Canada to do the same. If everyone leaves Microslop, that would make a huge impact.
Why?
Honest question.
My guess would be the deterministic configuration management. If it's for a personal machine then do what you want to make it your own but if it's an organization (e.g. government) you want the machines to be as similar as possible to reduce maintenance. Think cattle, not pets.
from a sys admins perspective it's painfully easy to deploy across hundreds of machines. NixOS is declaritive and immutable. you can take one system configuration of NixOS and throw the same config on as many machines as you want. packages, dotfiles, whatever are all replicated the exact same way on each machine. You can lock all the packages/apps, configs, kernels, etc to a specific version therefore a sysadmin may only need to upgrade the lot once a year. if a user some how breaks their system it's as easy a fix as rolling back to the previous generation with a single menu option.
So basically say you have your computer and you want to replicate your exact setup to hundreds of other computers. with NixOS it's as simple as setting up a git repo for your nixos config, pushing to it, installing nixos on every other computer then cloning your repo to all the machines and rebuilding. done. now you have hundreds of other computers that all behave and work the same way your computer does.
If something needs updating or a fix needs to be rolled out all a sysadmin has to do is fix it on one machine, push the change, pull it for every other machine and rebuild. done.
I am curious, what makes NixOS such a good choice?
From the article:
Its use of the Nix package manager means that each package is installed in its own directory with immutable and signed contents. That alone means that the setup is incredibly easy to reproduce across multiple machines, something that is an obvious benefit when dealing with different facets of a government.
Id argue an immutable distro would likely serve the same purpose but maybe its also because nixos isnt as "locked down" so itd be easier to configure for a specific purpose?
The big draw is probably that it's declarative, so you can define installations as code much the same way as you would do with Terraform. Instead of needing a pile of messy Ansible playbooks running custom scripts to change anything (and which can break if the target machine has an unexpected config), you'd just have one that pushes a new version of the config and runs nixos-rebuild. Rollbacks are just as easy if anything breaks. What's not to like?
Foreign countries using Google, Microsoft, or Apple, would be suicidal not to change platforms. Right now, the U.S. has incredible leverage: it can turn off their government servers, delete their data, and is certainly spying on them right now.
The only reasonable move is some kind of self-hosted setup, at least for a large chunk of critical infrastructure, with some cloud options for backups, maybe, who knows, if the country is too small or centralized.
All middle powers need to align and collaborate on this. There is limited programming talent and gaps and especially security (ai) gaps need to be filled. EU, UK, Canada, Aus, NZ, SK, Japan should actively pool resources.
US has been building soft power like this for decades, and Trump is pissing it all away.
If this process to get rid of dependency on US gets well underway, there's no turning that ship. US won't recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
US won't recover the position it had in fifty years or more.
This is not a bad thing. Over dependency on any one nation or even a bloc of nations is a bad thing.
I canβt help but think the dependency on the US that has been created played some role in whatβs happening now.
Honestly, I can see that. America has been top dog for so long, it doesn't value what it has.
Not even that. Iβm thinking too much money, power and influence all consolidated in one place.
The US has the most billionaires at 989 and Iβm guessing of the remaining ~2400 billionaires in the world, a not insignificant amount have substantial interests in the US.
Itβs good the rest of the world is watching it happen. I hope theyβre taking notes because itβs not stopping in America.
Nope. The US isn't teaching people to fish, its forcing them to learn How to to feed themselves. In the past they handed them the fish so they could control them. That power is lost now.
Windows is basically a zombie OS at this point, shambling along and eating brains.
Windows as a home user desktop is definitely coasting on momentum, though it is also the OS deployed on most new PCs which keeps it going.
I think the only thing really keeping Microsoft relevant is Active Directory (and Azure by extension) because a lot of organizations are dependent on AD internally, and there still aren't really any good alternatives that check all the same boxes. You could probably cobble together a working solution for ~90% of it with open source software, but it would be clunky, fragmented and feature-poor compared to an on-prem AD system. It would require a lot more administrative overhead to configure and maintain it, and user management would be a mess.
I'm starting to see non-AD companies cropping up. If you have to support Mac and Mac is absolute trash on AD, you need to run software to manage the macs which can already manage windows. With all the remote work, even RMM software is on the rise.
EntraID also seems corporate established. For a modern with system, with zero trust etc, you use EntraID instead of AD now.
Of course, legacy AD systems, if they exist, are also lock-in.
Neet, if NixOS get used more and more then the skills I acquired making my config will become marketable.
And nothing of value was lost
in fact, things got better
This might just be the best thing that happens in tech (for me) all year.
I daily drive debian just because boring and reliable. However, fancy package managers like flatpak and appimages and nix have made debian much more vibrant - it's easy to install new versions of things now.
That said, nix package manager on debian is just freakin amazing. Being able to just nix-shell -p <obscure cli tool> and exit when I'm done with it is magnificent.
That's the gateway drug anyway. The nix based home-manager is pretty cool.
While I've been tempted to jump in with NixOS my experience with nix packages and home-manager has felt kind of bleeding edge or experimental. Loads of things that don't work as intended on debian.
A sophisticated well funded user base like a federal government has really good implications for the stability of the project in the future. I'm really stoked about this.
NixOS is great, but it definitely breaks things. It's the way it works, though, not whether the software is bleeding edge. Nix lets a package specify its own dependencies, even if those dependencies conflict with those of another package. It does this by breaking the traditional POSIX file system structure that many programs assume they can depend on. It puts all sorts of things where they "don't belong", and then uses a small army of environment variables, scripts, and symlinks to stitch it back together so that no individual package realizes what happened. If you only use software from the package manager, this is often (but not always) seemless, but if you download stuff from the web, none of the system libraries it traditionally expects are there. Likewise, if you're using Nix alongside something like Debian's apt, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the two package managers doing things in two different ways causes some issues that are hard to interpret to the uninformed.
US: You want to cut us off? No! We cut you off!
NL: How petty are you?
US: Yes.
Considering the Dutch have ASML, this seems an unwise move for the US. But then, the Dogey Confederates are working towards the destruction of the USA. π
This great news! Away with USA!
So we did this because we didn't like what the court said not about us but Israel and its war crimes? This is the hill the admin is going to die (and drag us with them) on?
Microsoft: "No, not like that!"
Netherlands: "Let's make The Netherlands great again."
United States: "What have we done."
Phones when?
I've got a Jolla Phone this summer. Sailfish OS. Probably not something you can sell to the mainstream but it is a perfectly daily driveable phone for some target groups, and I belong to them.
The main issue to date is that security related stuff on phones is basically exclusively dependent on US American companies (Google, Apple), this is pretty much madness if we want to protect Europe against hostile actions by the US. So maybe things are starting to move.
