juipeltje

I decided to finally lean into using systemd more while i’ve been using NixOS, since the OS already relies heavily on it anyway. Created targets for my window managers, starting all my programs with services instead of autostart scripts, etc. And it worked fine for the most part, except for some reason, in qtile the systray widget refuses to load the nm-applet when it’s started through systemd. Waybar does not have this problem. I can’t help notice that systemd is not just a little slower, which isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it also tends to hang more often when shutting down, which is a bit annoying and reminds me of windows lol. Before NixOS i used Void, and while i never really cared too much about what init system i’m running, i can’t help but really appreciate runit for being so simple and fast. I’m thinking of moving back to Void but using the Nix package manager on top. I recently found a solution to the nix driver problem when using it on other distros, so now i should be able to combine the best of both worlds.

I think rmpc can do this too, which is an mpd client with album art support, but it’s terminal based and requires some manual configuring. I’ve been buying CDs over the past couple of years to get rid of streaming as well, and i think i’m finally ready to cut the cord. I’ve been experimenting with different music players but ended up ditching mpd. I like to be able to switch between audio outputs easily, like alsa or pipewire, and since mpd is configured through a config file it kinda sucks for that. I also like to be able to play CDs directly, eventhough i have ripped them all, but i haven’t been able to get any terminal player to play a cd, except for mplayer, which is too minimal for my taste. At the moment i’m really liking audacious. Also tried deadbeef and strawberry, but deadbeef doesn’t have mpris support ootb, and strawberry feels a bit bloated to me. Audacious feels like a nice middleground. Audacious does support viewing lyrics but not synced from what i can tell unfortunately.

Declaritive postmarketOS

If i remember correctly you can pass a txt file to pacman when installing packages, but i could be wrong. There is also BlendOS, which from what i can tell has an immutable base, with a toml config on top of it to install the additional packages you want. Never tried it myself though. I also use NixOS because i wanted to be able to reproduce my riced out system more easily if i have to reinstall. I do wish this space had some more competition, because it might make this way of running a distro more approachable. The closest thing i’ve seen aside from guix is probably those ublue customized images that you can build, but i’m not sure how comparable that is.

If you prefer stacking then maybe wayfire is worth taking a look at. It’s a stacking compositor but it has eyecandy as well.

Yeah like other people mentioned, guix is great but in terms of how it works it’s pretty much a libre lisp version of Nix, so you have to actually be interested in that type of system where you configure everything declaritively through a programming language. I personally use NixOS because i’m not really into the libre stuff, but i really love this way of configuring my system, but be prepared to spend months on learning and configuring depending on how far you want to take it. I don’t know much about parabola, but if i’m not mistaken i thought it was similar to arch but libre, so it might be a better fit if you just want to use a more traditional linux distro that is also libre.

I initially tried linux mint and ubuntu when i was like 13 on my laptop, which is almost 15 years ago now. At the time it wasn’t because i hated windows, but my monkey brain was just interested in it because it looked so much different. After i realized that i couldn’t just use all my windows programs like usual (and especially gaming wasn’t nearly as good back then), i quickly went back to windows. Fast forward to 2020, at this point i had started disliking windows mainly because all of it’s creepy questions when you install it, like wanting your handwriting information and all that, but at the same time i thought “well what can you do about it?”. Then i saw the LinusTechTips video about trying linux instead of windows 11. This was the first time i had actually thought of linux again in all those years. The video convinced me to give it a try and i started with PopOS. After a few months i moved to arch cause i liked the idea of customizing my distro more from the ground up. Stayed with arch for 2 years, then i got the distro hop virus. Tried a lot of them, fedora, opensuse, ended up staying on Void linux for over a year in total. Now i’m using NixOS and very happy with it, and i think i’m finally settling down on a distro. I know LTT gets a lot of flack for how they handled the linux challenge, but if it wasn’t for that initial video back in 2020, i would have probably never given linux another try. And with valve investing so much into improving wine and dxvk and all that, it was viable for me to switch as a gamer.

If you’re not afraid to dive straight into minimalism/command line, void linux could be a good choice, especially if the laptop is 32bit because void still has 32bit repos.

I would say willingness to learn and to compromise. And by compromise i’m mainly talking about trying to find alternatives to software that might not exist on linux, and see if those work for you. And if you end up finding a piece of software you need that really has no good alternative to what you need, you can always either go the virtual machine route, or the dualboot route, but i personally think that should be considered a last resort.

Yeah, i’m realizing more and more how convenient those variables are. I recently started using gtklock for example, a screenlocker that also has separate modules for extra functionality, which are also in nixpkgs, but the problem is that you have to explicitly specify the path to those modules in the config. So i wrote the config inside of home manager, and pointed to the modules path with the pkgs.foo variables. Worked like a charm.

I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn’t like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I’m hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it’s a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.

Yeah it’s at the point where i’m wondering if i still even need xorg. I’m still keeping it around just in case for now, but i could very easily purge it from my system anytime since i’m using nixos and all my xorg related settings are in a specific file. The main pet peeve i have with wayland is gaming related, and should hopefully improve when wine and proton go native wayland. I have a dual monitor setup and games always choose the wrong monitor by default, which means i can only use the resolution and refreshrate of the secondary monitor. I have a keybind to set the primary xwayland monitor with xrandr, which solves the problem, but it is a bit hacky. I also need to toggle vrr on and off with a keybind because it causes flickering on my monitor. It’s a bit annoying but atleast it works, on xorg you can’t even use vrr with multi monitor to begin with.

I wonder what distrotube is going to use from now on since he’s an arcolinux user. He recently made a video about turning dtos into an installscript bundled with a base arch iso, maybe he’ll use that?

Honestly wasn’t expecting them to use Hall Effect in the first place (have any consoles actually had those in recent years?) But let’s be real, this is also the least of the switch 2’s problems. Everything around this console is way too damn expensive. The only thing that’s priced reasonably (imo atleast) is the actual console itself.

Seems like a strange choice. If anything i would’ve expected them to just use a firefox fork or something.

I haven’t tried swaylock unfortunately, gtklock is the first wayland screenlocker i tried. Before that i think i was using i3lock-color on xorg, which also worked fine as far as i can remember, but the problem with xorg screenlocking is that it isn’t actually very safe. Also, i’m not sure what distro you are using, but if it is a systemd distro there is probably a better way to trigger the screenlocker. I’m not sure if that script works in that case because it might be elogind specific. elogind is used on distros like artix and void because they don’t use systemd. Elogind is basically just the logind part ripped out of systemd.

I recently finally configured my lockscreen again after switching to wayland. I’m using gtklock and so far it has been working really well. I’m using void linux with elogind installed, laptop suspends when closing the lid ootb. In order to trigger the lockscreen on suspend, i’m using a script placed in /etc/elogind/system-sleep, as described on the artix wiki

I like it mainly because of the image protocol and supporting both x11 and wayland. I still have alacritty installed as well because i like how damn fast it is. If alacritty had proper image support i’d probably only be using alacritty, but they are both great terminal emulators.

I’ve been sticking with music players that can output directly through alsa. I settled on strawberry cause it can do that and also has other features that i care about baked in ootb. Deadbeef can also output directly through alsa and i liked it for the most part, but what i didn’t like was that things like mpris support wasn’t baked in, so i would have to mess with plugins. I don’t know if there are any other players that can output directly through alsa, those are the only two that i could find so far.

I’m not a programmer so i don’t have much skin in the game, but from how it’s described it seems like a good idea to me and rust seems like a solid language to me. I do understand the concern from devs who don’t know rust and don’t want to learn it, but i guess that also depends on how much they would actually have to interact with it.