Now that’s quite an interesting NixOS setup, I’m especially intrigued by the tmpfs root portion. The link you provided was a great read, and I’ll keep this and honestly most of what you’ve described in mind for when I mess with NixOS again.
There are also these two blog posts by elis on setting up tmpfs specifically. Though these posts rather are setup guides, than “talking about the philosophy” of systems design.
This is a very interesting setup would you mind providing more explanation / documentation? Also would you mind sharing your nixOS config? I would love to try it.
My system configuration can be found on git.sr.ht/~sntx/flake. I’ve linked the file tree pinned to the version 0.1.1 of my config, since I’m currrently restructuring the entire config[^1] as the current tree is non-optimal[^2].
The documentation in the README in combination with the files should cover most of what I’ve described, with the following exception: disko is not present to the repo yet, since I’ve set it up with a forked version of my config and the merge depends on finishing the restructuring of my system configuration.
You can take a look at these (non-declarative) installation steps to get an idea on how TMPFS as root can be setup
If you’re interested, I can also DM you the disko expression for it
[^1]: The goal is to provide definitions for desktops, user-packages, system-packages, themes and users. Each system can then enable a set of users, which in turn have their own desktop, user-packages and theme. A system can also enable system-packages for itself, independent of users. If a user is enabled that has a desktop set, the system will need to have display-manager set as well, which should launch the users configured desktop.
[^2]: The current config assumes a primary user, and can only configure a single DE and apply the application/service configs only to that user.
This looks like a whole project. What is the overall goal of this build?
I am very new to nixOS and am interested in it. Specifically for ansible scripts to build out easily replicateable docker hosts for lab. I have also considered it for switching my primary desktop and laptops as being able to have the same OS with everything the way I like it is also intriguing.
Sorry for theate response. P.S. I love your wallpaper.
There’s no overall goal to the project. It’s just the result of me tinkering with my systems from time to time (I’m allocating a bit less than three hours each day to coding on personal projects to improve my skills, some of that time flows into my nixos config).
I am very new to nixOS and am interested in it. Specifically for ansible scripts to build out easily replicateable docker hosts for lab.
I’ve extensively used docker/compose before I switched my systems to NixOS, since then I’ve barely touched it.
The thing with Ansible and Docker is that you mostly define the steps you want your systems to automatically go through to reach a specific state.
Nix[^1] approaches the problem the other way around. You define the state you want to have, and Nix solves for the steps that need to be taken to reach that state.
If you want to try your hands at that concept, I recommend installing just Nix on one of your test machines and trying out development shells/devshellswith it.
For example the SwayFXrepo contains a flake.nix providing a devShell. This allows everyone working on the project to just run nix develop in the cloned repo, or nix develop github:WillPower3309/swayfx without cloning the repo to enter the development environment.
This can be combined with tools like direnvto automatically setup development environments, based on the current directory.
If you want a more encompassing example of what Nix can provide, take a look at:
This presentation by Matthew Croughan on Nix-Flakes and Dockerfiles.
[^1]: The “package manager” that NixOS is build around. Though I think of it more as a “build system” - not to be confused with Nix, the language the build “scripts” are written in.
I have also considered it for switching my primary desktop and laptops as being able to have the same OS with everything the way I like it is also intriguing.
While I personally think NixOS is one of the most potent software in existence, and a computer without feels less capable for me, I do not recommend it easily.
Just take a look at hlissner’s FAQon his system config (which I greatly agree with).
That said, I initially tried NixOS on my PC and pushed the config to a git-forge. I then installed the base NixOS ISO on my laptop and told it to build the config from git. And that worked flawlessly.
In leaving the PC unattended for about 20mins, it went from a full Gnome desktop to my Sway setup.
That’s the point when I was sold.
Sorry for theate response. P.S. I love your wallpaper.
Don’t worry about the late reponse ^^
The wallpaper can be build with nix build sourcehut:~sntx/nix-bg#abstract-liquid btw.
Humm good points in the articles. I think my goal of building docker hosts makes more sense. It is interesting how the took the declarative concepts of something like terraform and kubernetes and built it into an OS. It’s kind of like fedora silverblue but the two took different approaches. Perhaps fedora makes more sense on a desktop. I have a dev and DevOps background and like the idea of being able to more deeply learn Linux without having to rebuild my system from scratch when I bust it.
Can you explain home manager? What about things to consider when installing NIX package manager on another distro?
Perhaps figuring out how to get the wallpaper out of a nix distrobox would be a good learning experience.
Maybe you unplugged the device before unmounting it leaving the filesystem in an odd state? Next time it fails to auto mount check /var/log/syslog for recent error clues.
Finally, my life is complete. We have achieved feature parity with Windows.
Seriously, the BSOD QR-code is a great way to have a more inclusive system. Hardened geeks can still sift through the boot log to find problems and newbies can just get help online. Win-win.
In general, linuxes autodetect all hardware, but do not automount all filesystems. This is intended. It is a matter of configuration, and so the different distros have different tastes regarding this topic.
So I grabbed my ventoy-drive, downloaded latest mint ISO on it and instead of doing something productive I planned to do I’ll spend couple of hours at reinstalling the whole system.
With Mint, you should be able to get to a working system that lets you do your paperwork within less than half an hour.
You can set up all your customizations again when you have more time. But it should also be no issue to just copy your old /home folder to the new system between Mint and Ubuntu. Then the only step after installation would be to install the programs you had before.
Yes, I know. Existing drive layout however says that I need to repartition the whole thing and that says that I need to copy couple of hundred GB’s over to something else before reinstallation and so on, so it’s not a half hour job. And while I’m at it it’s better to do it right than half-ass it over a long, long period of time.
Logseq is a pretty nice FOSS alternative to Obsidian I came across recently. Tmux is absolutely necessary for any terminal work. Wezterm is my favorite terminal emulator because you can easily disable all of the shortcuts except very few you want (tmux handles most of terminal stuff for me). Some new alternatives to old command line utilities:
bat is cat but 1000 times better. I love it so much!
fun factI also recently learned that it’s safer, because you can have a file that has some bad command, then the backspace character several times, and cat doesn’t display the characters “deleted” by the backspaces (but it still executes). Bat doesn’t do that.
Personally, instead of Tmux, I’d recommend trying Zellij. I started with Zellij right out of the gate, but a friend of mine who dislikes Tmux a lot quite enjoyed Zellij, so I assume it’s somewhat better.
I know about Zellij, but in its current state, I think it doesn’t make sense for me to switch. I really lobe my Tmux setup, and I don’t think I would be able to replicate it on Zellij, mainly because of Tmux plugins I use. I also don’t think that Zellij currently has any advantages over Tmux except for better default config and user friendliness that I don’t need. I’m looking forward to the Zellij ecosystem getting better tho. Some day, I will probably make the switch. The WASM tabs feature looks extremely promising!
I use zoxide plus fzf which ends looking like this.
My default go-to for a better cd was teleport when I still was on bash. The tp command can be aliased to cd. I don’t think it will run on other shells though.
For a one-stop-solution for all your problems related to package X not being available in the repos of distro Y; consider the more than excellent https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox.
You should probably start with this one as the others might be less intuitive to you at the moment. Furthermore, their use-cases and thus why one might prefer the others over Lutris in the first place might not be clear currently and not even be stuff you worry about in the first place.
With a bit of modifying code to use the color picker and maybe rearranging the workflow to adapt to the new system, apps as advanced as DaVinci Resolve and LibreOffice can have permissions as restrictive as this (the network permission would of course may be needed but it would still be marked as Safe by Flathub).
You can use the file picker API to open the files or folders your app would need to access while having no filesystem permissions at all. You can access the camera, microphone, and GPS without the user devices portal, by simply using the respective portals where the user has the power to allow or deny access to such devices as they wish.
You can record the screen, take a screenshot, and pick a color in the screen by simply calling the proper portals, with the bonus that the user will be able to select if they want the entire screen, a specific window, or a specific area to be recorded/captured and whether the cursor should be shown or not.
Heck, even TeamViewer can be as this restricted without losing any functionality if they use the Screen Cast portal which allows apps to mirror input from a remote device! They would of course need the network permission, but that’s still safe.
Yes in the sense that the APIs were made because of flatpak, but not in the sense that devs would need to keep two separate code paths for flatpak vs non-flatpak - portals work everywhere.
systemdboot (unless I’m on a distro without systemd)… My main desktop is running Gentoo OpenRC atm
xanmod kernel… It’s literally just free performance
wayland… I have 3 monitors with 3 different refresh rates and 3 different resolutions, X11 just isn’t an option for me (smooth animations are a bonus to ig)
Unlock origin, ecosia and dark reader as extensions, regardless of browser
VSCode… I like FOSS software as much as the next guy, but I want my code editor to just work with minimal to no configuration
Fish shell, has the best autocomplete and integration of any shell
Nice, I second VSCode, although I have always a VIM version for the quick edits installed.
I just checked the website for xanmod and it looks interesting, several questions:
Do you really use it on a desktop? (The website seems to suggest it is optimized for server loads)
How exactly do you experience the difference in performance?
What is your most low tech computer you run xanmod on? (I simply heard too many times, that nowadays there is no good reason to compile your own kernel unless you have very specific needs.)
Xanmod is a gaming-optimized kernel… Idk where you read the server stuff from and the performance and the difference isn’t so much in performance… I mean there is still an uplift there but it’s more improved frame consistency (less microstutters) the games just feel more snappy.
Idk what you mean by “low tech computer” but I’ll assume that means “weakest”, I run xanmod on my main desktop PC, which is the only computer I game on, so it only makes sense there. It does tend to kill battery life on laptops and idk anything about getting it to work with nvidia (I’m on AMD). As for the “weakest” computer I’ve ran it on… tbh I don’t remember, I don’t really use a lot of low-end PCs in my daily life.
As for compiling xanmod, no reason to, 90% of the distros either have it in their main repos, or in the AUR on arch or on a copr repo on fedora. I did compile and configure it myself (I use gentoo) but the performance difference between the packaged version of xanmod and the one you compile yourself is minimal, most of the uplift comes from the kernel itself.
You could use VSCodium fork. I mean, it’s still the same exact shit, and I use it everyday without ANY observable difference to official builds of VSCode. Unless you end up joining the dark side one day and install 2000 ViM extentions lol
Same here. Ubuntu almost made me believe that linux is a pain in the ass to use and you need to fix some shit after every update.
Now I use arch and it’s great. Nvidia is very annoying because they constantly publish drivers that break things, but you can just roll those back and wait until they fix it again. And that gets worse as GPUs age. Apart from nvidia, I’ve had exactly one update issue (telepathy-kde being removed and causing the pacman dependency resolver to get confused) that was fixed in about 2 minutes of googling.
My biggest complains with Ubuntu lately are Firefox is a snap package and when it updates it yells at me to close Firefox so it can update it and if I wait too long it forces the it closed, and it gives me countdown notifications. Annoying and something out of Windows 10 forced reboot type shit. The other is the automatic apr upgrades break cuda/nvidia drivers forcing me to reboot the whole system. Pain in the ass.
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