@Maholmire @dcc @pwm

> Do you feel that there really is a skill ceiling with Nix?

Not sure if you mean "*nix", "Linux", or the distro "Nix". I have nothing to say about the last one, but if you mean Linux/Unix, they're malleable.

> barely enough to carry me beyond a clueless end user

Secretaries at AT&T used to use little Unix terminals to fill out patent applications; according to Ken, this was the first business use for Unix.

> never to the point where I can learn and absorb the necessary skills to deploy a home lab and made effective use of the resources available.

I don't think that's the case; like, walk before you run, doing it in a container in a VM in another VM and then the port-forwarding didn't work, like, that kind of thing happens. It's possible, sometimes likely, that some shit is fiddly or confusing. In half the languages, I can't quite remember how switch/case worksⁱ: I have to look it up almost every time. Some shit is fiddly.



ⁱ C: switch, case, fallthrough, break required. Ruby: case, when, no break, no fallthrough. Go: switch, case, no break, no fallthrough. The shell: "case $thing in", "*))", no break but clauses are terminated with `;;`. I know JS has it, I do not know what it *is*. Lisp doesn't have it, but cond does more or less what you want. I think Forth has it but I think you just use a lookup table if you really want that kind of thing. switch/case may be more like "if you've only seen one dog, it's easy to remember what color it was" but off the top of my head, I don't remember what the arguments are to get qemu to forward just one port.