Ah, so effectively the standard installation. Alright, thanks!

Regarding your last point, we only know that the flesh of a watermelon is indeed red because we’ve seen it before. If, say, an alien would suddenly come to Earth and be presented with a watermelon, they would not know what colour it is without cracking it open or otherwise probing it with various tools (granted of course that they perceive colour like we do)

Attributing nothing to the divine is also the way I go about it. We have scientific explanations for most phenomenon we see on a daily basis, and for those we do not, I do think we will find scientific explanations for them one day. None of the mysteries of the universe that would later be answered have been caused by the supernatural, so I have no reason to think it will be different.

However, I do think that a lack of observable trace of a “divine being” is not necessarily an evidence of nonexistence. To me, my agnosticism is not a form of compromise, but a recognition of the limitations of humans, as well as an acknowledgement relative inconsequence the question of whether a divine being exists or not is to the universe and to my own life. If nothing in my life or in the known universe can be attributed to the divine, why does it matter whether it exists or not? If an extraterrestrial exists in some distant galaxy, surely it would not matter to them whether I exist or not. That’s the way I think of the idea of divine beings.

Anyways, it’s kind of great to be able to ramble about this on the internet, most of the people I know are religious and unfortunately would not be very tolerant of this type of viewpoint.

I relate a lot to this. If asked “does God exist?”, my personal belief is always that we don’t know and that we will never know, and it doesn’t matter anyways so why bother? I do certainly see some value in religion, in that it does bring a lot of people comfort when faced with the concept of mortality, and that religious organisations do a lot of charity (this is true where I come from, at least). However, I do think that said value has been greatly diminished, if not perhaps even eliminated entirely, in the face of the attrocities people have committed in the name of religion, i.e. attempts at restricting women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, etc.

Huh, never thought of it that way, thanks for that. If you’ll excuse me, I have quite a lot of rethinking to do.

Man, that’s worse than what I experienced growing up. Out of curiosity, why did you decide to go with atheism? Personally, I’m agnostic (I think that’s the right term) because I see no compelling evidence or argument for either side, and I am of the opinion that a human’s finite brain could never even come close to figuring out the answer. And no, the Bible isn’t evidence, not one that’s even close to being the slightest bit rigorous at least. To me, it’s as much evidence for Christianity as the Harry Potter books are for wizardry.

This is precisely why, if this was something more complex like a server or a setup with multiple devices, NixOS blows Gentoo out of the water. But, how significant is that advantage for a simple desktop? That’s not a rhetorical question, I genuinely do not know. There are two other factors for me that play into this decision that I forgot to mention: documentation, and unique features. Gentoo has better documentation, and even if that was not the case, I could just use the Arch Wiki; I can’t do the same with NixOS. As for unique features, these are currently what brings the two to a stalemate for me: NixOS has rollbacks and impermanence, and Gentoo has SELinux (and musl, which I want to try out). I suppose I can replicate rollbacks on Gentoo with something like Git and ZFS snapshots, not perfectly but to an extent satisfactory for my rather simple use case, and musl is more of a personal curiosity than anything significant for me. So it boils down to which between SELinux and impermanence would I rather have on my main system?

I don’t mind their different beliefs, what matters is the fact that they try to force it on everyone else. You think being gay is bad? Then don’t be gay yourseld. You think getting an abortion is bad? Then don’t get an abortion. But the moment you try to force that on anyone else is the moment you’re inviting the world to shit on you. After all, no one is passing laws to discriminate against straight cis people, or forcing everyone to get an abortion.

It’s like how kids throw meaningless insults when throwing a tantrum because they know they can’t win in a proper argument.

They are fiscally conservative… but only for any government programs that aren’t tax cuts for the rich.

I have heard good things about Nix on Gentoo. I like both distros equally, I just have a difficult time deciding which to use as the main system and which to put on a VM so that I can finally stop distrohopping.

My parents used to fearmonger the everliving shit about LGBTQ+ and abortion, and as a small kid I ate that shit up. But then at some point, my brain probably developed some modicum of critical thinking and thought, wait a minute, why in the world does it matter to me what people do with their own lives, if it doesn’t even affect me or anyone else for that matter? Why are my parents, along with every single bigot, incorrectly think that they are entitled to weigh in on someone else’s life decisions?

Every single argument from them boils down to “because religion”, but as someone who was raised Catholic (agnostic now), one of the things that they taught me was quite literally to “love thy neighbour” and to not shit on people only because of their beliefs. So why are the very same people who taught me that now doing the opposite of what they preach, trying (and fortunately failing) to shit on other people just because they don’t have the same beliefs? “My religion says it’s not OK,” well they don’t believe in the same things you do and could not give less of a shit about what you believe, so why not just leave them alone and let them live their life? It was around that point that I realised they were just hypocrites, and absolutely nothing more.

For anyone wondering, turns out you just have to follow the quickstart guide exactly, no added steps necessary. It’s quite impressive.

Alright, thanks for all your help! I’ll give it a shot tomorrow.

Yeah, ZFS can do it too, in fact I think that’s what Graham used in “Erase your darlings”. I’m thinking of just going the tmpfs root route, making a new dataset for /persist, and copying over the necessary files from my original root dataset, and using the impermanence module to take care of the rest of the work. That way, if I miss some files, I can just go back and copy them over from the root dataset to the persist dataset, and once I’m sure I got everything, I can just destroy the old root dataset. Would that be a good way to go about it?

Might give that a try later myself then. I’m planning on setting up impermanence later, so might as well risk doing this too! I think I just need to sign the ZFS kernel module to get secure boot working.

Oh nice, I didn’t realise there’s an entire Matrix channel for that, I’ll join in a bit then. I’m assuming by “working offline” you mean booting into a live USB? Also, is that what the Impermanence repository does on the nix-community?

Oh, how’s Lanzaboote? I’ve wanted to try it but I heard somewhere that it might not be suitable for a ZFS system.

I think Flakes are quite useful and, although they might be somewhat challenging to wrap your head around, isn’t really all too hard to actually set up once you have your configuration.nix and hardware-configuration.nix. Here’s the video tutorial that got me started on my Flakes journey, and here’s a really good set of dotfiles to use as an example for when you want to start modularising your configurations. So to answer your question, I think you should, yes.