I tried NixOS for a bit but it was very inconvenient in comparison and I felt like it was impossible to tinker with or understand if you weren’t good at Haskell.

You don’t need any haskell knowledge to configure a NixOS system. It’s mostly just researching the right options and setting the desired values. Pretty simple. For more advanced stuff like custom modules, functional programming experience helps a lot but that’s not necessary for installing packages and enabling services.

Documentation isn’t great but what it does have going for it is that it’s right in the place where you configure it: In the NixOS options. Wanna configure systemd-boot? Just search for it: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=23.05&size=50&sort=relevance&type=packages&query=systemd-boot
It’s self-documenting.

I got tired of doing everything manually

Perhaps check out NixOS

No, nothing to be seen unfortunately.

You could block the meme subs I guess.

Do you use a car sharing service or do you own a car? Because it sounds like with your usage pattern, the former might be cheaper.

Not 100% sure this device even has a chip. SatStat doesn’t show values for orientation; only for magnetic field which I heard Is used to emulate a compass but I’m really not sure.

With those requirement, the first question you should ask yourself is whether you really want e in your bike at all.

What are the reasons you want an electric bike over an acoustic one?

Next is what you’re going to be using it for. You said it was for the daily commute. A commute can be anything from a 5min ride through a quiet neighbourhood to a 1h ride through the forest and countryside.

Distance, terrain, traffic etc. make a difference on what kind of bake suits your best. How does (or will) your commute look like?

Note that there’s both the rolling unstable channel and a bi-annual stable release channel.

To get it out of the way first: There are no financial issues. There are more than enough funds to continue operations as they are for a sufficiently long time.

What is actually happening is that a long time sponsor has indicated that they (understandably) no longer want to foot the huge bill of hosting the entire archive of binary caches ($9000/mo). Finding a more sustainable setup is what the community is currently concerned with.
There is no risk of operations shutting down any time soon, the NixOS foundation has funds set aside to continue even this unsustainable setup for at least a year. We just want to be more efficient with our and others resources going forwards.

That’s what all this you might have heard of is about.

Btw, even if the binary cache were to go poof, we don’t technically need it. NixOS is a source-based distro like Gentoo and source hosting is not a concern. The binary cache is immensely helpful though which is why we’d obviously prefer to keep it.

Certainly not. Nothing should write to /usr/bin except for the package manager in FHS distros and some distros binary directories aren’t writable at all.