I’m a robotics researcher. My interests include cybersecurity, repeatable & reproducible research, as well as open source robotics and rust programing.
I could imagine bootstrapping via Bell Labs Unix from the 90’s would be more authentic, yet demanding LFS experience. I wonder how far back computer historians could bootstrap up to a modern compiler for integrity and verification purposes?
https://www.owlfolio.org/research/bootstrapping-trust-in-compilers/
https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/unix_fourth_edition_tape_rediscovered/
I’ve observed some notable improvements when benchmarking with the CachyOS kernel on NixOS via Chaotic’s Nyx using moderately old hardware:
https://programming.dev/post/38304031
Haven’t yet tried replicating the same comparison on newer hardware, but would be interested to see what others have tested. Any observations?
I’m in search for the same white whale. There’s quite a bit of documentation for multi-seat configurations for Linux, i.e. supporting the use of multiple screens and keyboards for separate simultaneous logins.
However I’d like to remote into a separate game scope session with its own human interface inputs and virtual audio and video outputs, as the same primary user normally logged in active desktop environment session. I’d like it so the remote and local sessions would not interfere with each other state, but without necessitating multiple Linux users for each session use case.
That last bit is what makes it more tricky and very niche. Supporting essentially multiple desktop environments probably demands separate user debus sockets. Using c groups via containers makes that viable, but like you, I also like to avoid containers and extensive volume mounts.
I top linked the most recently published video mostly for the introductory breakdown in ternary logic equivalence, but the interview with the ternary researcher, Dr Bos, also linked in the description above includes a number of corrections and accurate description of the subject.
Yeah, definitely not a lost art or anything, as physical ternary signals already have applications in communication like high data rate interfaces. Still, would be interesting to see ternary expand into logic domains with emerging developments in TCMOS research.
This is discussed around the 27 min mark of the video with Dr. Steven Bos, particularly in maintaining voltage thresholds for signal propagation when using multiple devices, in context of logic, memory, and communication use cases. Interestingly, for example, GDDR7 and USB 4.2 already use physical ternary signals.
Edit: signal to noise ratio is also discussed at the 40min mark, also with respect to increasing information density vs complexity from higher symbol bandwidth, or terms of radix vs frequency.
Thank you for all the work that goes into maintaining this instance!
Appreciate the heads up. Looks like they use merge bots to auto update the package version JSON files for git packages, making for a very large/frequent commit history. Was that what made bisecting imposable?
I also see they pin the nixpkgs input, but do others normally modify that nixpkgs input to follow their global nixpkgs from their own system flake, or does that invalidate the use of Nyx community cache?
Compiling the Linux kernel from scratch takes over an hour on this laptop. Given I’m tracking the unstable channel on a rolling distro means doing that several times a week. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Or at least I don’t…
I don’t have resources to locally build an optimized kennel for every update for each of my systems, thus my interests in keeping with a community cache.
I didn’t do much here, just swapped the kernel via config and ran some benchmarks. I posted as I was more curious to hear of what engineering trade offs may be at play, and what experience folks have had in daily driving CatchyOS’s kernel patch sets.
I wasn’t sure if these results were specific to my older hardware, or more generalizable to newer systems.
Indeed perhaps. I’d really like to see something like a Content-addressed Storage model from snix get upstreamed. That could really revolutionize bandwidth requirements for nix package updates and store sizes. Imagine downloading only the binary diffs for updates to packages like large modern browsers, IDEs, election apps, etcs, that mostly share common files across versions and packages. Suddenly, daily driving a rolling distro on the bleeding edge would be no more taxing on networks or disks than your average infrequent Debian update.
I haven’t gotten around to testing this yet, but I think they just share the Android app proot scaffolding. I wasn’t too satisfied with the proot performance on Android in general using Termux, as with interpreted runtimes like python, the system call overhead really shows itself. That of course doesn’t change here with nix-on-droid.
Sounds like their target customers are commercial service providers and industrial device manufacturers using NixOS, but need to support stable deployments for longer than NixOS’s current 6 month release cycle. Probably not to applicable for individual desktop users, but they still plan on hosting a public channel and cache for newer releases.
IBM acquired the company behind Fedora Linux. Although I doubt they had any corporate influence in the production of this particular vlog.
I wonder if they would have had better luck with Kubuntu or KDE Neon? Perhaps if they’re still on KDE by the time KDE releases their Arch distro variant, they could test that too on their hardware.
Given the amount of trouble shooting demonstrated throughout the video, don’t think the marketing was entirely positive…
Appreciate the detailed context, and thank you for your work!
It’s a great video, and I hope the author is able to publish more nix content like this again soon. We’ll just have to watch their blog’s RSS feed in the meantime.
Whoops, I misread scheme as schema. That’s really powerful. One thing I wish I could reliably do with a Nix LSP is navigate to a definition of a symbol.
I haven’t dug into Guix yet, so is the config more of a markup and less of Turing complete language? That sounds like it’d be easier to grock or optimize an LSP for.
I have heard that Guix takes a stronger stance with respect to unfree software. I don’t think any of the official nix Hydra infrastructures build for unfree packages, but they are packaged and indexed into nixpkgs. Has Guix been difficult at all in that regard, i.e. using proprietary drivers or closed libraries for work or personal hardware?
Would be good to cross post this to:
https://programming.dev/c/nix