Ohh, that’s cool. How far do you want to go with this? I had the idea of using a custom wayland protocol to make per-app global menus instead of per-window so you can have an app open without any windows, like on macOS, in the compositor I wanted to write. However writing a compositor using wlroots is still incredibly difficult if you have no prior experience so the whole thing didn’t get very far yet. If that’s something you want to do too, I’d be very interested in this.
(Speaking of, why did you decide not to build this on top of wlroots?)
There’s two different ways of identifying a nix package: its attribute path in the package set, and the name it self-identifies as. Here’s an example where those differ, firefox-esr. Its attribute path is firefox-esr while the package name it reports is firefox.
It’s very fast to find a package by its attribute path since that’s essentially one or more map lookups. In contrary, the package name isn’t unique (for example, firefox and firefox-esr both have a package name of “firefox” because they are built from the same package file just with different sources) and also doesn’t have an index, so to find a package with a matching name you have to search through the entire package set and evaluate every package to get its name and check if it matches.
nix-env -i searches packages by their package name, which as a consequence makes it slow and also unreliable since you might not get the package you were looking for, but instead another with the same name. nix-env -iA somewhat fixes this by installing packages by their attribute path, but even if you use that you get the same issues with nix-env --upgrade since that always searches for packages to update by the installed packages’ names (it might even replace one package with a completely unrelated one which coincidentally has the same name!).
The new nix profile however stores the attribute paths a package was installed from so doesn’t have any of these problems.
Also, can I “normally”/traditionally install software on NixOS, e.g. through Steam?
Depends on what you mean by traditionally. Steam works without needing any special setup by enabling it in your configuration, just programs.steam.enable = true. There’s also imperative package management with nix profile (don’t use nix-env -i which you will probably come across, it’s broken by design). Personally though I recommend sticking with the declarative configuration and nix-shell which temporarily brings packages in scope for the current shell only.
The Breeze app style has gotten the visual overhaul you’ve all dreamed of: no more frames within frames!
Yeah, it regularly appears in my nightmares /s. Sorry Carl, but I’m gonna have to patch this out. I hope this will get a config option like the change to the Dolphin details view that made the click area to open a file span the whole row (doesn’t look like it’s configurable as of now). I kept patches to undo that for a while as well…
Spectacle has gained support for rectangular region screen recording!
Oooh, I’ve been waiting for that. Very cool! Now I hopefully don’t have to fiddle around with OBS anymore to record a section of the screen.
Why? Don’t get me wrong, I have an Omnia as well and think it’s awesome, but I use it as an all-in-one router, as a pure wireless access point I’m sure you could get something less expensive.