Solar Bear

They have a zero tolerance policy and direct it at the small fish instead of the actual problem, which is governments using it to kill people, companies investing billions into speculation, and nobody stopping them or making them pay for copyright infringement.

What exactly would you like me, specifically, to do about that? I’m open to all suggestions.

It gets logged in the event viewer, yeah. That’s how I discovered it, on account of the screens not waking up in time to show the actual bluescreen. The users were only reporting that their computers were deleting all their windows when waking up. From their perspective, all they saw was their computer taking a mildly longer time to wake up from deep sleep and then losing their entire session, but what it was actually doing was hard rebooting.

Headless is fine, the bug was specifically triggered when a computer woke up and detected a monitor exists, but the monitor took some unspecified amount of time too long to wake up. It was also fixed at some point, I’m not sure when, but it went on long enough that we swapped dozens of cables because it specifically only happened on the ones using DisplayPort, not HDMI.

Fun fact about monitors turning on slowly: did you know Windows has a bluescreen code for that?

The WIN32K_POWER_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bug check has a value of 0x0000019C. This indicates that Win32k did not turn the monitor on in a timely manner.

~ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-0x19c--win32k-power-watchdog-timeout

That’s right, Windows will panic and throw a bluescreen if your monitors take a little too long to wake up. Had the pleasure of dealing with this suddenly becoming an issue and causing wide bluescreens on wakeup after an update back in mid-2024, on any Surface Dock using DisplayPort with specific Acer monitors.

I feel like NixOS might be the only distro that could realistically handle all these use cases, but I’m a bit scared of the learning curve and the maintenance work it’d take to migrate everything over.

It’s a very steep learning curve, but I personally think it is worth it if what you want is to sync up all your various devices to a single common baseline configuration. I sought a single-distro solution for all of my systems for a long time and always ended up fragmenting them eventually because nothing I tried until NixOS was capable of handling such a diverse set of use cases in a way that would satisfy me.

I am similar to you, in that I regularly use a three server cluster, a gaming desktop, a multi-purpose personal laptop, and a work WSL instance on my work laptop. I still have some purpose-built distros where it makes sense; I use Proxmox for the actual server hosts themselves and then run NixOS VMs on them, along with running VMs for Home Assistant OS and TrueNAS (with the drives passed through, of course). All of these things I could do on raw NixOS (even Home Assistant is packaged in Nix, and there is a project to port Proxmox UI and tooling to NixOS) but I like the stability of the dedicated and battle-tested distros for critical infrastructure, especially for stuff whose configuration is very specific to a given task.

With NixOS, each other device has a consistent shared configuration and package set, they all get updated to the exact same versions thanks to flakes so everything works the same and as expected no matter where I am, and it’s all declaratively configured and documented in one spot. Spinning up a new system or rebuilding an existing system is as easy as pulling the config and changing a few relevant lines, and from there it effectively assembles itself from scratch to the exact state I want it to be in. There’s never any lingering packages or configuration cruft because the system is assembled from scratch every time it updates. Much of my home configuration is also managed, so aliases, environment variables, even vim configs are consistent across the board and set in one location.

The main downside is resource efficiency. Nix is designed to be reproducible and declarative, not fast or lean. It uses much more storage than a typical package manager, and packages are built with wide compatibility in mind so you often are leaving performance on the table from not using newer instruction sets like CachyOS. You can compile your own packages to fix that part, but that obviously takes a lot of spare processing power. I’ve been considering setting up my server cluster to do automatic building for me, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.