OOPs

I decided to try Cursor today (first time using any coding assistant) to refactor my sloppy NixOS config, and I’m really impressed to far. My config is so much cleaner and very well documented. It even has automated backups, a README.md, and CHANGELOG.md now!

The cost has been ~$20 so far (I’m still tinkering with it).

ETA: I also use Arch NixOS btw

Edit 2: I asked it “how might I streamline my deployments a little?” It wrote some nicely polished scripts that use deploy-rs, and wrote some nice documentation for it.

The script didn’t work on first run, so I added the console output to the context and asked “what went wrong here?” It debugged and fixed the script, and updated the docs.

I think this has been the most frictionless NixOS experience I’ve had so far

Nah it was a while back. IIRC there were multiple sources, but I don’t remember any of them 🙃

Though, I don’t really remember the details either. Maybe it was OS specific? I know there was a dodgy FUSE implementation out there for macOS at some point, and Cryptomator depends mounts its local drive with FUSE. I use macOS and NixOS, so it coulda been that.

I’ve been trying Peergos lately, and I’m pretty happy with it so far.

Google’s nagging offers for free trials of Gemini made me realize that I was basically handing data over to an AI company 🤦🏻‍♂️

I started to go down that path, but then I heard that there were problems with data corruption

Those seem like reasonable points, I think.

I don’t use any other Apple devices, so I have no opinion on that. And I don’t often find myself provisioning macOS, but I use Nix to manage my system, so transferring to a new MacBook has been pretty easy for me.

I tend to do a lot of Linux-ey things, and macOS (Unix-based) is much closer to that than Windows is. Also, I often see programming languages/runtimes that require extra/different steps to get up and running in Windows vs. Linux and macOS.

Sure, Windows has WSL, but every time I’ve needed to do some IO-heavy operations with it, it was extremely slow. (Though it has been a few years, so maybe it’s better now?)

I also do a lot of web dev, so macOS offers a few more tools. If Safari wasn’t so terrible, then macOS would become less necessary. But AFAIK (I haven’t checked in a while), macOS is the only environment that can run Safari in an iOS emulator.

My second choice would be NixOS… or maybe Ubuntu.

Windows seems a bit bloated to me. I remember seeing something in the Start menu about X-Box, and I couldn’t uninstall it, for some reason. I could remove the icon from the menu, but it still linked to some binary that was installed with the OS. I’m not a gamer, why do I need that on my system? Also, why did I have to uncheck so many data harvesting options during setup? I’m not very comfortable with things like that being built in to the OS, and enabled by default. I remember a time when things like that were commonly known as “spyware” – I guess it’s just normalized now. (To be fair, I’m not a fan of having to decline Apple Intelligence multiple times on macOS either.)

macOS. I find it to be the least inconvenient for most of my needs.

Passengers*, I think. I’m pretty sure passenger vehicles are subject to higher quality standards than vehicles meant only for cargo (ISS supplies, for example).

(I could be wrong. I’m an internet comment, not a rocket surgeon 🤷🏻‍♂️)