For me, I really want to get into niri, but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet).
Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.
NixOS
Nix flakes, me.
I just started yesterday in a VM. It’s no stress and you can easily put your configuration on metal after. Pretty fun stuff.
The most satisfying part of the NixOS process is deploying to bare metal and watching it work exactly as you intend it to
I have my garuda installation just where and how i want it to be. NixOS just always seemed very interesting, but i don’t want to run it on my daily machine.
Don’t, you can still install nix into Garuda. Works great as a separate package manager that won’t get in the way.
I tried it a while back, thought it would be good for my servers, but at the end of the day I found that it was a lot of learning for a very small benefit that could be achieved differently. Instead I focused on learning Ansible which also allowed me to write configs to deploy lots of services to my servers. I still want to learn Nix at some point, but I feel it’s a lot less important if you have an Ansible playbook that does the same thing and even more for any distro you might care to install.
I think the problem is that most people dive right in and go to NixOS which has its quirks as a linux OS (see FHS). The Nix language is great at building and moving source code between computers, really any big collection of binaries. If you don’t do that, try just using the nix-shell command to instantly run a piece of software without installing it. You can write a shell.nix file to hop into and out of an environment with whatever software you need. Once you can write a couple .nix files then move onto NixOS; which after all is just a big collection of binaries.
docker I guess, I still don’t know how it works, create them, etc
I’ve been using linux on and off for 20 years and docker reignited my interest for running linux. There’s plenty of good guides and free courses, if you need help finding one - let me know and I’ll send you a YT playlist.
its counter intuitive to learn but a godsend after you learn it
Bcachefs, and bcachefs on root. Need something with filesystem level encryption instead of LUKS, and *ubuntu’s and derivatives have all abandoned ZFS on root installs now.
What’s your use case for FS-level encryption? LUKS has worked for me so far, I wonder where I’m missing out.
Common Lisp. It would take a long while before I’m comfortable working on a project using that language. There’s also Lem editor but setting it up is a pain on NixOS.
That’s my first time hearing of Lem—it looks fantastic. What’s the issue with it on NixOS?
- There is no lem package on NixOS.
- Common lisp related packages tend to be outdated
- NixOS violates FHS to allow each packages to build against specific versions of dependencies, so CL tools might not work as expected.
I want to use Neovim but I haven’t gotten around to really learning it yet.
NeoVim is almost a drop-in replacement for Vim (the configuration file is under .config). Plugin installation might be different, tho.
Find a migration guide and be brave.
The learning curve is absolutely colossal, especially if you want to use it as a full IDE. Even with the legend panel it still doesn’t tell you have the story
Wayland, but I’m patiently waiting for xfce to support it
A fine day that will be!
Zed - I’ve been kind of using it for one-off edits, but it’s just not mature yet for most languages.
I kind of want to try wayland just to be modern, but I’m pretty happy with xmonad and don’t want to learn another window manager.
I migrated from XMonad to Sway, it checks all my requirements. I don’t miss the Turing-complete configurability.
You might want to look into River, a tiling Wayland compositor inspired by xmonad. Disclaimer, I’ve not actually used xmonad before so I’m not in a position to compare the two. But River is configured entirely through riverctl commands. Its “config” is an executable, by default at
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/river/initbut you can point it to a different path, which can technically be any executable file that just executes when River starts. Ordinarily it’d be a shell script calling all the riverctl commands you want to get your River set up the way you like it, but it could be any executable you like really. You can also use other languages other than shell scripting.It’s still in pretty early development, but I daily drive it for my main general-purpose machine and it works completely fine. I use it for web browsing, coding, gaming, chatting, general productivity, etc, all works. I’ve noticed some minor hiccups but nothing breaking or unusable. Tbh I would say it’s more stable than Hyprland which I’ve also used and have noticed that Hyprland updates (especially from git) would frequently break it, whereas I was running River compiled from the latest commit of master branch for a while and never had an update break things.
Lapce, an IDE written in Rust. It’s nice and light compared to most IDE’s, so I use it a bit on my aging laptop from 2015. However, it doesn’t have the extension ecosystem or polish of my favored IDE, VS Code.
Have you tried zed? Written in rust, has many extensions. I gave it a try, I quite like it. It’s blazing fast. But I haven’t tried on an old machine.
I haven’t, but I have heard of it. I think parts of Lapce are based on some Zed algorithms.
Python. Been wanting to learn it for years but all mental capacity I have toward such stuff is drained by work. The whole situation is ironic.
There are a lot of “I like this in theory but nobody else I know uses it” social things like Matrix 😑
Anything beyond setting up a network-wide dns blocker on docker, so… crowdsec, fail2ban, some proxy-related stuff, zero trust tunnelers and so on.
Why? Because its overkill to my current setup and I don’t see myself using em for real other than for learning purposes, and thats it.
And before someone asks “Do you protect your server at all?”. Other than making some “hacky” stuff with my internet so all ports appear as closed whilst they actually aren’t? Eh, not really. Still, my server is about to reach a year of running nonstop 24/7 and it has never been hacked a single time since then, so naaaw.
How do you tell whether it’s been hacked? The hallmark of a good hack is invisibility, like modifying logs. Do you perhaps count SSH sessions in your router and verify it against client logs, or somesuch technique?
Immich
Wanting to spin-up but constantly delaying…
LLM speech-to-text.
It appears continuous speech recognition is possible, but I only got as far as recognition of an audio file.
Still very cool!
I’ve been using Niri with
Xwayland-satellitelately, and it works as a charm. it works out of the box, and you simply run it in background, and launch your X programs withDISPLAY=:0curious to check that out, going to be testing wine wayland driver on niri as well
