Yes, you get the same version of deps and the actual software too. For example, wine breaks my game from time to time, but if I got clone my setup I will get the exact version of wine that I use that works, not the latest unstable version

No, it’s also for your system to use locked versions of deps, so if you git clone you get a flakes.lock as well with all the versions. When you install from a git repo you get the same system again

Is it, though?

https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/nonunique

Nonunique means other package managers have it, so it excludes those you said that inflate the user count

You can combine stable and unstable packages since they can have different dependencies

Given this you can have the base system be running the unstable versions, while holding back things like wine from upgrading

Why? If it’s installing singing in the background it’s not stopping me from doing my work

I dispute the needlessly part. NixOS unstable has very new packages, do you’re getting some fresh updates before some other packaging systems.

Is it less “efficient” than waiting for major versions? Of course. But I’m willing to run an update in the background on my desktop to get that new software.

For me, you can’t separate those two things. I want an online identity. I don’t want to switch servers because of whatever reason and have to import bookmarks. I want my app to keep track of my subscriptions and just give me my replies/messages. I don’t want to care whether I’m on lemmy.ml or whatever

I think the verdict is NixOS is perfect for desktops, since you probably don’t care about data or compiling everything or slight inefficiencies

I mean, I could write a server that redirects the notifications pushed to me and read the actual posts on the instances themselves

Yes, I now understand I need to have a server listening for the notifications being pushed to me

I’m a web developer, so…

Who or what is going to send this request if not some server that implements ActivityPub?

Me, directly

ActivityPub works via pushes. So there’s nothing to query. There HAS to be some server for it to send and store that data.

Great, this is what I wanted to find out, so there has to be something listening for pushes

There has to be a service running behind that domain name to do something.

To do what, exactly?

Let’s say I just sent a request from my non-existent server with my user id, and just every time I wanted to check whether I got replies I would query the other server (which a Lemmy server would do to get notifications about replies or upvotes)

If I subscribe to !asklemmy@lemmy.ml I could just… check !asklemmy@lemmy.ml without actually loading any data to a server, I could just literally load it from lemmy.ml

I COULD host an instance, but why bother to store that data if I’m only going to be using it myself?

Why does there have to be an instance there? Who checks that?

I joined two of them and they both went down