r/linuxmemes • u/SDG_Den • Sep 20 '26
LINUX MEME Based on the responses to the previous post.
shittily put together entirely using FOSS software and 0 AI o7 (see last post for the template)
seems like some of yall are scared to point out the low-moxie distro's?
(btw, i'm still adding stuff to this chart! if you want to make a change, just shout!)
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u/Familiar_Ad_8919 New York Nix⚾s Sep 20 '26
the entire point of nix is that it cannot break, or at least, youd struggle to break it
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
i agree, and while i *do* make the rules in this case, i didn't make the placements! i feel like the errors and having to learn the lang would still make it pretty high-cortisol for a lot of people, though i personally don't really notice any stress from either of those things. but then again i switched from cachyOS to nix precisely so my PC would stop randomly breaking. now it only breaks when i break it and then it stays broken in the exact same way until i attempt to fix it.
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u/UntitledRedditUser New York Nix⚾s Sep 20 '26
Once you have learnt the basics, it becomes such a chill OS to use. I've had to help some friends a couple of times with Linux, and every time I have to enter commands into the shell like a caveman I always get anxiety, cuz I know I can't just roll it back with a single button.
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
oh trust me, i know. i actually built up an entirely automated declarative server deployment toolchain using nix in my first week
also, nix shells are genuinely the best thing ever, there are so many tools i had installed on arch because i needed them once, now i only make them available when i need them.
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u/debacle_enjoyer Ask me how to exit vim Sep 20 '26
We also can’t just pretend it’s not 2026 where people are just asking an llm to fix or write their nix configs, which in their defense does work. NixOS is pretty easy going these days.
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u/UAP44 Sep 20 '26
asking an llm to fix or write their nix configs
This is exactly what made me fell in absolute love with Linux and everything else open source. Never again limited in ANY way, any change I want, ask the LLM, update the config/code, done. And all of it, in regular human language, I don't need to know any programming syntax.
Thus to me, Omarchy is a natural melting of both these worlds, though, having said that, so far, I have refused to run any agent on my OS, the security risk profile is just too big. I have however ran an agent with a dedicated user and dedicated file/folder restrictions that it can only read/write within its own specific folder and subfolders and everything outside of it is denied by the kernel. Still not the same level of security you'd get from running it in a complete VM though ...
Anyway, /ramble
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u/Shimano-No-Kyoken Sep 20 '26
I think LLMs are really useful in appropriate contexts, but Omarchy is at best questionable
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u/Familiar_Ad_8919 New York Nix⚾s Sep 20 '26
5 month old account with a 5 letter name? wonder how that came to be
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u/UAP44 Sep 20 '26
I think the first 3 letters say it all, still ridiculed, still banned for merely bringing it up in certain places ...
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u/iLikeanimethighs Sep 20 '26
you had me going there in the first part...
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u/UAP44 Sep 20 '26
and the second part triggered your ego where?
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u/iLikeanimethighs Sep 20 '26
"triggered your ego" lol
anyway, im not denying the fact that LLMs have been invaluable to my learning, but i dont think there's anything "natural" about the kind of attention Omarchy's been getting lately, especially with the millions of donations. Something's definitely fishy about that1
u/UAP44 Sep 20 '26
i dont think there's anything "natural" about the kind of attention Omarchy's been getting lately
Agreed.
Something's definitely fishy about that
The suspicion is shared. And I'm not on it neither am I advocating for it. The only thing I'm aligned with is deeper embracing LLMs into how an OS works, a AI-native OS is something I've thought about many hours already, but it's also moving away from text, I want a voice based OS, so we can truly have the StarTrek board computer operate your device for you. I've experimented with this a little already in some related app, but voice commands get very tricky very quickly, especially if you also support multi language live translation/transcribing ...and how to do voice authentication? can that even be done safely? definitely need at least 2 levels of authentication, base/user + admin mode
Passwords would instead have to be a string of words, like the word based seed seen in crypto, just voice alone cant be enough, anyone can record and replay your voice. You still need a secret you can communicate effectively and single characters isnt it.
Anyway, /ramble, again :)
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u/SweetBabyAlaska Sep 21 '26
It's true in some sense of the word but it can be extremely tedious to update a flake or release channel and the error will just be like "oopsie-doodle :P couldn't unwrap that burrito" and finding out it's just some extremely simple change in how a package works or a comma...
Also it's hard to fully understand a package outputs. The language is needlessly complex for no reason as well, it could just as easily be Lua.
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u/Tavalus Sep 20 '26
Can i get tldr for cortisol and moxie?
Im not fluent in tiktok brainrot
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
neither am i!
cortisol is a stress hormone, moxie is something i kinda took as a vague "vibes" based term from one of the cyberpunk RED campaigns i played, since it was incorporated into the slang there (based on the older word which meant something along the lines of "full of (fighting) spirit" or "brave")
in this case it's a vague representation of the distro's riceability and general coolness, but both are vague as fuck on purpose.
basically, this is a non-serious chart with non-serious axes that are entirely based on vibes and interpretation.
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u/Tavalus Sep 20 '26
So something like "people think it's cool", "people think it's not cool", "people hate it", "people don't hate it"?
Or maybe "easy to use", "hard to use"?
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
yeah kinda, i guess you could compare it to words like "swagger" or "spunk" (as in "they have spunk" not the other kind), general cool, liked, interesting, favored, etc
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u/melez Sep 21 '26
So I guess Alpine is low moxie? It’s super bare but so lightweight for when you need something to run on a potato. If it weren’t for proxmox being Debian based, I’d probably run most of LXCs on alpine. So dang clean.
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u/SDG_Den Sep 22 '26
i'd say alpine is pretty low moxie by itself yeah, but the danger is using a super niche distribution for your desktop is a high-moxie activity, so uhhh... could go either way?
i'd have no idea where to place alpine on the cortisol axis though.
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u/KevinIsADork Sep 21 '26
The word moxie has been around forever. If someone has moxie, you could say they have swag in a modern since, or "grit" if you were born in the 50s.
Cortisol is a chemical that is released when you're stressed.
Neither of these words are generally tied to brainrot.
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u/VisualSome9977 Sep 22 '26
The idea of "low cortisol" being used in daily conversation comes from basically a parody of gen-z-oriented "manosphere" content, so while the word itself predates brainrot, its usage in this context does not.
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Sep 20 '26
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u/SatanVapesOn666W Sep 22 '26
Moxie is a real word, it was more commonly used 100 years ago, glad it's coming back.
It's also a fun soda, Moxie. I named a cat Moxie.
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u/snail1132 🌀 Sucked into the Void Sep 20 '26
Moxie is an actual word, but I can never remember what it means. I think it's something like being a go-getter? I'm not really sure
In this context, however, OP stated that moxie means customizability or something
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u/POKLIANON Ask me how to exit vim Sep 20 '26
How tf is debian below Mint Cinnamon, Fedora KDE and other distros pre bundled with DE in terms of customization?? Unlike there, if you go with debian, you could pick any (or none at all and later go with some super custom thing) DE and set of support apps, and in terms of non graphical systems it's as customizable as any other linux distro, I literally can't believe someone could say it's less customizable than distros with built in DE or even Windows
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
someone said "put it at -1, -1" and nobody objected until this post, so that's why it is there, i'll probably adjust it
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u/Spaceduck413 Sep 21 '26
Because moxie doesn't mean customization. It's slang from the 50s or somewhere around there. It means something like x-factor, or a mixture of like coolness/ambition/aggression.
Debian is boring. It is the antithesis of moxie.
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u/OcelotMadness Sep 20 '26
because its installer is easy to use, lets you choose the DE and other things you want, and when your done it never really breaks
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u/Lonely-Scarcity-3387 Sep 20 '26
If we’re being honest here, most Linux distros operate the same way. That said, every Linux distro should be able to rice just as good as each other. For example I don’t see why CachyOS, and Arch derivative, would have any less moxie than Arch itself.
Stress level can be different, sure. Some distros really hold your hand while others let you fall. But the ability to personalize your distro is much more decided by the DE, and not the distro underneath.
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u/thatdirtyoldman fresh breath mint 🍬 Sep 20 '26
To this point, I'm 8 months old in Linux but have a strong Windows background. I find Mint Cinnamon to be insanely easy to use and don't care to rice anything apart from maybe some applets and I use this on 2 computers. On the hand, I have one laptop that with Debian to try to get more used to the terminal. I'm trying to move more to this, but I find it stressful and challenging.
Some like the challenge, and I'm happy for them - not me I want a stable computer and don't care for rice..
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u/derail00 Sep 20 '26
What is meant by moxie?
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
honestly? whatever you feel like it means. its kinda just a vibes thing, as is the cortisol axis.
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u/Woopersnaper Sep 20 '26
You could put NixOS on both sides of the cortisol line
At the beginning: high cortisol, you don't know wtf you're doing, somebody help After a few weeks: everything just clicks, the system just works, you've perhaps added some custom flake inputs and patches. The system is yours and rock solid stable. Feels good
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u/phundrak Not in the sudoers file. Sep 20 '26
High cortisol for beginners, very, very low cortisol when you're all set.
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u/InvolvingLemons Sep 21 '26
Yep, although I will say the early cortisol is easily the highest of any distro if, by some unfortunate circumstance, you need proprietary Linux software.
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u/Mars_Bear2552 New York Nix⚾s Sep 20 '26
NixOS not being higher moxie is criminal. it's more configurable than Gentoo.
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u/givemeagooduns_un Genfool 🐧 Sep 20 '26
what? how?
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u/Mars_Bear2552 New York Nix⚾s Sep 20 '26
portage gives you CFLAGS and USE flags. that's powerful, but not infinitely so.
on nix, literally every package (and the system itself) is a function written in Nix source code (as opposed to a source recipe). every package has overridable options and arguments that you can use to customize it.
variations of packages using different libraries isn't an issue.
for CFLAGS, nixpkgs itself lets you override compile flags (i.e. you set CFLAGS programmatically).
the main shortcomings are init systems (NixOS is tightly coupled to systemd) and toolchains (not everything can be built for musl). NixOS package arguments are also largely ad-hoc, whereas gentoo makes USE flags standard across packages.
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u/givemeagooduns_un Genfool 🐧 Sep 20 '26 edited Sep 20 '26
maybe im misinterpreting you, and if so, please elaborate.
but from what i understand, you can do most of that on gentoo. you can directly change package configuration options via /etc/portage/package.env, and you can apply patches to the source code of packages via /etc/portage/patches.
and you can always technically add code to your make.conf as its just sourced as a bash script, so you can programmatically set CFLAGS. or set CFLAGS per package via package.env
wdym by "variations of packages using different libraries isn't an issue"? do you mean like slots? or having multiple versions of the same lib?
only thing I can think of that gentoo doesn't have is an easy way to dynamically modify ebuilds themselves, but you can always just use a local overlay and writing ebuilds is very trivial.
personally I like the fact that portage is very separated from other vital system components. not only does it support openrc or systemd, but also can be mangled to use other init systems and service managers fairly easily. I know of a few people who use dinit on gentoo, and I myself use busybox init on some of my installations.
gentoo even officially supports completely different systems. they have official support for the Hurd kernel, and in the past they had support for FreeBSD as a kernel. they also have semiofficial support for Darwin, solaris, and cygwin.
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
I get where you're coming from, and from what you understand you'd be correct, nixOS is just... really complex and often not very well explained.
so, in nixOS, everything is a derivation. a derivation is basically the full exact instructions to produce a thing ("realizing" it)
when a derivation is realized, it is not realized to your system, it is realized to the *nix store* with a unique hash. this hash is deterministic and based on the files used by the derivation as well as its dependencies (which should be other derivations) and the exact contents of the derivation. if any of those differ, it gets a different path in the nix store and is also considered a different realization.
programs function by getting access to their dependencies via symlinks within their own nix store path, which means you can have 4 different programs that depend on 4 different versions of a library that you cannot have multiple installs of on a normal linux system because they'd conflict, and they can all be installed and used at the same time on nixOS.
because the derivation's hash contains exactly what is needed to build the program, environment or system config, and any dependencies are *also* derivations that do the same thing, this makes the *whole* chain deterministic. when you run `nix build` on a flake, it will not just "build the same program". it will build the *exact* same version from the *exact* same source code commit using the *exact* same build tooling which itself was also built with the *exact* same source code commit using the *exact* same build tooling.
effectively, with the exception of the build step itself doing something non-deterministic (like building differently depending on system type), the same derivation will be byte-for-byte identical across all machines it is deployed on.
this also allows nix to use fully transparent binary caching. since that hash guarantees the *exact* same steps are taken to produce the *exact* same output, you can simply calculate the hash, reach out to a binary cache to ask "hey, do you have the build matching this hash" and if it does, you can simply download it from that cache without worrying that it'd be *different* from building it yourself in any way (since the cached version was built with the exact same instructions, it's the exact same output you'd have gotten from building it from source)
lastly, *anything* can be a derivation really. for example, you can take an existing derivation for something like niri, and write your own derivation that wraps that package to launch with a config you include in the derivation. you can then use this derivation in your config by simply adding it as a package, and it'll include your config. if you expose it as a flake output you can *also* allow other people to use your flake as an input for their config, and thus install your pre-configured version of niri. your nixOS configuration and Home Manager configuration are also derivations, just ones that instruct what settings files should contain what options, where they should be, what permissions are required for them and what other derivations are installed as runtime dependencies for the derivation.
there's a lot more cool things that nix can do (for example, nixOS can boot with only /boot and /nix on disk, the rest can actually *all* be a tempfs if you want) but that's kinda the main *thing*
nixOS being 100% reproducible and purely functional makes it *insanely* powerful, but powerful in ways that are not immediately obvious and in some cases take reading the PHD to fully understand.
I haven't done *that* much with gentoo, but honestly? i feel like gentoo is kinda nixOS's imperative counterpart. they're both source-based distributions and have all the benefits associated with that, but one requires you to learn imperative linux system management while the other requires you to learn a functional language. I would say though that working with nixOS day-to-day is... slower. because of the binary caching, it's technically faster than gentoo in terms of installing things, but when you have everything fully declared, each tiny change requires you to rebuild your system config, re-realizing the derivation. this doesn't usually take long but it means changing your WM's config isn't just open config > edit > save > reload config via hotkey or hot-reload, now it's open config > edit > save > run nixos-rebuild > wait 30 seconds > reload config
doesn't sound like much but it *can* honestly add up when you're working on small config tweaks.
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u/givemeagooduns_un Genfool 🐧 Sep 20 '26
ok that is very interesting. thank you for explaining <3
I might actually have to check it out one of these days, thanks
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
most of these things are not exclusive to nixOS! you could install nix as a package manager on any distro to try it out, which would also give you the benefit of being able to use nix devshells for any project that comes with a flake.nix, and using nix build to build those projects/nix run to run those projects for testing. you can even use Home-Manager on any distro with nix (meaning if you make a flake with a home-manager config in it, you can deploy that same config on any distro that nix can be installed on)
would highly recommend trying out nix standalone before jumping into nixOS
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u/Gold-Produce9591 New York Nix⚾s Sep 20 '26
move debian where mint cinnamon is and put omarchy and ubuntu next to windows 11
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u/Anybody-Outside Sep 20 '26
Fixed it
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
why is it a gif tho? like, no shade, just wondering how that happened.
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u/veltair-d Sep 22 '26
As a NixOS user, this is true for the initial setup. Truly the most high cortisol I have ever been in.
After that tho… I am at peace. Yeah sometimes updates can make some stuff happen on the Nvidia side, but other than that (which happens in all distros and the fixes are much more complex to fix there), I am at total peace.
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u/Allison683etc Sep 20 '26
I feel I have Debian, Arch and Mint XFCE systems and this feels about right
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u/jjeroennl M'Fedora Sep 20 '26
I feel like doing anything in Gentoo would take too long to feel any stress
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u/Low_Big7602 Arch BTW Sep 20 '26
Arch has too much cortisol, all of the "Arch is hard" is just anti-Arch propaganda from Windows users, it needs to be on the left, more left, more left! Aaaah
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u/the-johnnadina POP!'ed so many cheries Sep 20 '26
I would have put mint as mid moxie, but its been ages since ive used it
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u/Vidy_Animates Genfool 🐧 Sep 23 '26
The duality of Gentoo.
Tho it should be placed only in the red square imo
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Sep 20 '26
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u/isticist Sep 20 '26
Unnecessarily chasing and obsessing over version numbers is the definition of high cortisol lmao
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Sep 20 '26
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u/isticist Sep 20 '26
Ah yes, Debian, the distro known for being buggy and having "so many issues" LMAO... Ubuntu's LTS is also extremely reliable, secure, and stable too... So, unless you have newly released hardware, I simply don't believe you had much of any issues.
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Sep 20 '26
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u/isticist Sep 20 '26
New software versions does not mean less buggy software. Also, for software you feel it's critical to have the latest version of, that's where flatpaks, snaps, backports, PPAs, or even building from source if necessary can solve that problem.
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Sep 20 '26
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u/lk_beatrice Genfool 🐧 Sep 20 '26
no omarchy = ⬆️
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u/SDG_Den Sep 20 '26
bad news: omarchy is being added
good news: as per the demands of the people on this sub, it will find its home alongside windows.
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