I used to know a guy with a lamp on the top of his helmet on a horizontal swivel. It rotated freely so the light would stay level no matter how he tilted his head. But it didn’t rotate left or right, so it always pointed in the same direction as the helmet on that axis. It was a rear-facing red light - I don’t remember if it also had a front-facing light. I had a conversation with him while he was wearing that helmet, and I couldn’t take a single thing he said seriously with that light swiveling constantly.

Recently I met someone with turn signal lights on their helmet, controlled by a wireless transmitter mounted on a handlebar. It’s not exactly what you’re asking about since I don’t think it had an always-on light for visibility. But I mention it because I thought it was pretty cool.

Well you’ve got one visitor currently cranking it lol

They set a high bar with the first two seasons.

I felt like there were highlights in season 3. But it also felt uneven. The episodes I liked felt good, but not great. The first two seasons had great episodes.

There was also a distinct lack of social commentary, which I feel is important in Star Trek. The best we got was Terrarium. Definitely a fun episode, but it’s core is a trope we’ve seen a number of times. What Is Starfleet looked like it was thinking about commenting on something, but frantically pulled the ripcord partway through, and went in a direction I wasn’t comfortable with. (Which is too bad because I thought the directing in that episode was very cool.) There’s nothing on the level of Ad Astra Per Aspera. Instead we got 5 episodes of mortal struggle vs unreasoning monsters.

I’ve done that too, and it’s not the same IMO. Ansible doesn’t put entries in the boot loader for older system states you can boot into in case you break something. It’s possible that Ansible configurations aren’t idempotent. The exact versions of packages that get installed can’t easily be managed with Ansible if you’re also regularly updating packages. There’s lots of stuff that is much easier to configure with NixOS and Home Manager. I found my Ansible configs were always out of date, which doesn’t happen with NixOS where editing the config file is how you make any system changes.

I think there are arguments for NixOS for a casual user despite the learning curve reputation. But there are also downsides to consider.

The pros:

• There is a good, user-friendly installer that makes it easy to get a working system
• From what I can see setting up KDE is pretty easy - there are configs online that you can paste into configuration.nix without modification
• NixOS is good for gaming with proprietary drivers and Steam - again it’s a matter of pasting a few lines of configuration
• Like with other distros it’s easy to recover if something breaks
• Unlike with other immutable distros you get a lot of options for tinkering with your system, and experimenting. You can dip your toes into the advanced stuff, going from casual user to Linux expert at your own pace, with the safety line of being able to roll back changes at any time.
• If you stick to the basics you can have a very stable, very update-to-date system without much difficulty.

The cons:

• To get the full safety of rolling back a previous point in time you need to ditch channels, and instead use pinned nixpkgs revisions. The best way to do that is probably using flakes - but whatever strategy you use you need to depart from the setup the installer gives you, and learn enough to remake your configuration.
• You’ll find contradictory instructions depending whether they’re written for use of channels or flakes.
• Going beyond the basics of installing packages, and using premade NixOS modules gets you into the infamous learning curve. For example I’m guessing that managing kwin scripts declaratively in Nix config might be an adventure. But managing them by hand the way you do in Fedora might be the same. (I haven’t tried this, so I’m not sure.)
• There is some stuff you have to know, like if you want to run binaries that weren’t built for Nix you want to set up nix-ld first.
• If you’re building software you have to learn to do things the Nix way because of the lack of FHS. That’s great for Nix fans like me, but frustrating for some.
• There is no graphical software center, nor automatic updates. You have to use the workflow of installing stuff by editing your config file, and get used to using search.nixos.org to find stuff. This is a pro from the perspective of having a stable system that can be rolled back to earlier states, but might feel less user friendly than a GUI workflow.

Even if you set up flatpak (which is easy to set up tbf) you’re probably going to be managing flatpaks using the CLI.

It would be easier for me to recommend NixOS if the installer set up a flake configuration with more niceties pre-installed, like nix-ld. The next best thing would be a de facto standard flake starter configuration for people to copy. But like I said, I think there is a case.

Since timely updates are an issue, specifically Debian Testing is a good stable distro.

I came here to make the same comment lol. My dog does look pretty unhappy when there is string in the butt.

I find that Vimium makes web stuff pretty keyboard usable. There are gaps, like it often doesn’t work well with non-native drop-downs. Unfortunately Vimium does override web app shortcuts, so when you find an app that does have good shortcuts you have to register a rule to disable Vimium for that site.

Ortegas and the gorn playing board games was adorable!

I liked this episode! There are some things that seem impossible, like the moon’s orbit and atmosphere - but that can be explained away by the Metrons. The vaccine thing, although on brand for Star Trek, I thought was silly and unnecessary. There are plenty of other sources of tension available.

I kinda appreciate how the Metrons orchestrating things can explain details that seem extremely contrived or impossible otherwise:

• a human and a gorn being stuck in the same spot in the first place
• a traversable wormhole that they didn’t detect, and that is unlike anything on record
• a moon with an orbit that passes through a gas giant thermosphere, that somehow hasn’t had its orbit decay long ago, and that somehow retains a breathable atmosphere
• Ortegas and the gorn surviving burning the atmosphere - you see a blue glow around them when that happens

The First Lady of Ferenginar?

Lol! I think it’s a nice car because it’s the car I’ve always wanted: a small electric hatchback.

We have a dog

It’s a Chevy Bolt

Sorry! This is it: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-on-droid

My wife is. Well, I’m stretching the truth a little - she actually uses Manjaro.

I was going to say we don’t have any of these distros in the car, but technically I do have Nix on my phone - there’s a fork of Termux that puts Nix in a user space sandbox. And the phone does connect to the car. The only piece missing Android Auto integration for the nix command.

I also have a “btw” decal to go with this. I haven’t put it on because I’m not sure about including it.

It’s me and my older child who use NixOS btw

That’s almost exactly it! Puppy Linux represents the dog, who would run Puppy Linux if anyone would think to get a computer for her

• It has a nice interface for searching history - nicer than the history search included with the shells I’ve used
• It has a “workspace” mode - it remembers which directory commands were run in, which gives you the option to limit history search to commands run in the same directory, which are often most relevant to the project you’re working on in that directory
• If you want you can back up, or sync history to multiple machines. I know I’ve been in situations where I know the command I want is in history, but it’s in history on my desktop, and I’m on my laptop at the moment

He’s flying a future time machine, and it was made into a time machine before he started flying it according to objective time.