There is no government in Italy which was led by a single Prime Minister which was as long as this one. Reshuffling or not. No government ever achieved completing the 5 years of mandate. This is indeed the longest government Italy ever had.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_Italy

So what?

Should they support X11 forever despite the fact that even the maintainers of X11 are barely maintaining X11?

Are they forcing you to do anything?

A piece of software using another piece of software does not mean forcing anything on anyone.

Moreover, KDE runs on X11 and I don’t know of any distribution which does not provide Xorg in their repositories.

Works on my desktop, much better than X. What problems do you have with wayland?

Forced by who exactly?

Achieve world peace. Make no mistake, or I will give you a Snickers bar.

It’s 1990, after an explosion who killed you you’re placed in half life. The problem with Jory in the Sanitarium has been solved.

Researchers have found a solution to people with psychic powers eating other people in the same structure.

By working with people from the new id psychic software studio they devised an alternate reality where other patients are transformed into imps and other hellish creatures. Patients are provided with an array of guns to defend themselves from attacks.

Level 2, pick up your shotgun.

Still got an X201 somewhere. That thing learned me Linux, got me through school and found me a good job at a time when all I had was a backpack and that computer.

Some day I shall switch it on and update it.

I know plenty developers who run mostly in WSL just for the ease of having Word and such software on the same machine.

Stop this bullshit, if you want me to work from home you have to considerably increase my salary so that I can rent a place with an office and setup the office.

I remember an engineer tasked to redesign a piece for a military jet. It was a piece used to refuel the jet while in flight.

Apparently on jet had to perform an emergency landing as they went out of fuel. The injector and the hole were designed by two different teams, one in the US and one in Europe. Apparently nobody told the Europeans that measurements were in inches…

Thank you, you reassured me quite a bit. I’ll have a good read of the manual.

It is not really a build server, it’s a compute server. I’ll have users installing hundreds of different software packages, most of them using incompatible libraries and thus I was thinking of using Nix. Alternatives would be LMOD, which however requires the administrator to install very single piece of software, which… We don’t really have a dedicated system administrator and I don’t really want to go through the compilation instructions of every single piece of software we use. Alternatively everyone could compile their own software or install it through something like conda, but that eats up a lot of storage space since every library would be duplicated across users.

Hello, thank you for the in depth explanation! I am not very familiar with nix, and yes I’m talking about the package manager. I have installed NixOs recently to toy around with it and see whether it could be a good solution to certain problems we have. I have determined that NixOs itself is not mature enough for what we need, but I do see value in the nix package manager that other solutions do not offer.

Regarding the 4 points you raise

1. I’m not too worried about hash squatting, I guess there’s no way around it, but other ways of managing packages have way worse flaws than that.
2. I do want my users to be able to build packages. In most cases I imagine we’ll use pre built packages, but often packages available are not optimized for certain architectures.
3. How does the nix sandbox work? Just so I know what I’m working with. Do you know where I can read about it?
4. Does root actively run installed packages at any point? If that is the case I’d be a bit wary to use nix for this purpose.

Thank you for the clear explanation. This is good enough for me I guess then. What I am most afraid is not really a colleague building a malicious package on purpose, but rather them installing something which is then run as root and gets access to the whole system. I understand packages are built by unprivileged users, but in the end they are owned by root.

What I wonder is whether in the way it is possible that something is run as root without someone specifically deciding it should be.

Thank you for the explanation. Yes, I’m talking about the nix package manager, not about the operating system.

As far as I understand packages are built by less privileges users, but libraries and binaries are owned by the root user in the nix store.

https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.34/installation/multi-user.html

What I wonder is wheter this could lead to root executing untrusted code. I will have several users installing packages and I can not trust that they will check every package. Thus I’d like to know whether I can trust the system to be resilient without careful attention.

Spain does grow some.

I use fedora with wayland and use teams at work. The non official desktop program is completely unusable.

What I end up doing when I have a call is open it both in Firefox and chrome and check which one works first. I’ll open it on my phone as well in case neither works. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.

I found that audio does not work if you connect headphones after the browser was started.

In general my solution is to push to use jitsi anytime I can.

YouTube, Spotify and other services have a great advantage over locally stored mp3: a strong recommendation system and a virtually infinite library.

It would be good to have a recommendation system which does not depend on these systems, but the difficult part is to get the data to build it.

I reckon the metadata scraped by Anna’s archive may be used to build something like that, but that will eventually become outdated.

Thank you for the detailed explanation. This is for academia, the organization I’m building it for is my research group. About 5-10 people will have access to the system to begin with. Regarding their favored system and experience: most of my colleagues use Ubuntu or wsl on windows.

Regarding the need of openhpc, there may be things in there which are not available in repositories of most distributions. Most software we’ll have to run we can not install from repositories as we’d need custom compilation for the hardware. e.g stuff compiled with avx-512, specific cuda drivers, mps support. OpenMP is not something we’ll be able to use unless we obtain quite a few more nodes, but I don’t expect it to be a thing.

In the institutional cluster we use they have a custom built Gentoo distribution and for software they use easy build and EESSI to deploy the software, as well as manual compilation when modules are not available, and they provide the software to the users through LMOD. I do find EESSI and easy build quite nice since they provide ready made building recipes, I do find the use of LMOD quite tacky and it often starts having problems once you need more than 5 modules at once. Were I to find a better alternative to LMOD I’d take it any day. One important thing here is that we definitely want a way to install different software with conflicting library versions. Not as much as a large HPC cluster which needs tens of versions of the same software, but we’ll likely need to install about 50-100 different computing programs and it’s very unlikely they all support the same libc version when running at the needed optimization level. I’m not very familiar with the container approach to this kind of things. I have used containers for the deployment of applications, but not really to run calculations. Is is possible through containers to provide code compiled specifically for the hardware at hand? What is the advantage in using a container to say run gromacs, rather than pointing the user to the path of the compiled binary?

Regarding the kubernetes and slurm split. I definitely want to have some persistent services running: databases, a couple web applications and maybe a Jupiter webpage to visualize results. It could be nice to also be able to setup that allows persistent services to run: I have a couple applications which currently work around slurm by scheduling long running jobs and picking calculations to execute from a DB. However most calculations will be research simulations which at most execute for a few days.

I wouldn’t say it is very important to have the precise scheduling of slurm, but I definitely don’t want to manually handle a queue of jobs submitted by other people.

I guess maybe then it does not really apply. The idea is to have one CPU of one of the servers dedicated to user login and then a queue manager such as slurm managing the jobs across all servers. I will probably need a per server configuration since hardware differs across them, but all of them need to be able to run the same software.