Maybe I’m doing something wrong or I’m not in the right places but I attend, lead projects and socialize at my college’s physics, robotics, and engineering clubs, but the likeminded people I do find either aren’t very social or aren’t compatible with eachother. Thats not to say I dont get a small group going every once and awhile its just the overall pattern is people graduate, drift off, and any new members… to put it kindly, dont exercise the same level of critical thinking.

Maybe I’m just in the wrong places, college is a joke afterall, but I’m just curious if this is the kinda thing you ment by locally or not.

I stick around because (like some other people here) I want to live to see or even better help discovery the set of rules that underly the universe, see the stars even if just in photos, see what humanity is capable at its best, create anything that comes to mind, and learn everything I can. If the reason I dont want to live is the world around me (which it is) then I’d rather go out fighting, trying to change things rather than giving up outright (as a sidenote I wish someone created a place for people like this to meet and converse I see y’all scattered around the place but I can’t find a singular congregation spot). I mean I have what could either be classified as very well thought out delusions of grandeur or long term plans for a sort of immortality and if there’s the slimmest chance I can achieve that then I’m gonna shoot for it, and if I die trying then I get to die knowing I contributed to science in some hopefully big ways. So in summary I live to spite the world we live in and for the admittedly astronomically low chance I achieve my insane goal as the reasons for not living all relate to not having enough time and being restrained to a material world. Writing it out loud it’s quite convoluted.

Hello! Made a Lemmy account to comment on this, I’ve been a long time lurker. As someone who also went into Nix blind, its always gonna be a hard time a first, its a super different paradigm then anything else out there. Few recommendations,

1. Use flakes, nix channel is legacy and is imperative meaning nix channel changes won’t be copied per system
2. Try to purify everything, you may not succeed but if you try to nixify everything then you’ll get a much better understanding of the underlying systems of nix and of course your is.
3. Fuck the wiki read the code and other peoples configs. The wiki and the docs have largely been misleading and the nixpkgs code is usually super easy to read, the source is also linked to on search.nixos.org
4. Use home manager early. Working with NixOS gets better at a rate exponential to the amount NixOS has control over and your home environment is a huge part of that.
5. Learn modules, all of nixpkgs is made of modules and your system should be as well, if you throw everything into one file you’ll have a really hard time generalizing later on, check out vimjoyers channel for this seriously he’s great.
6. Understand that Nix, NixOS and NixLang all are huge upfront investments of time for a time save later on, its absolutely worth it in my opinion but you need to be aware its gonna be very difficult and you should focus on putting your energy towards the parts most important to you. If you have multiple systems you want nix to seamlessly deploy on focus on system relationships like roles, users, flake parts, etc.

And full disclosure once you get over the learning curve it gets easier to write and understand nix, but you realize you did everything poorly and you’ll restart.