phantomwise

Hi! I'm trying out Nix and I'm trying to set up and organize everything. Usually I put all my configs in a directory which is also a git repo and synced to my NAS, using the same subfolders they'd be in, and use GNU Stow to symlink the top-level folders (/dotfiles/home/ to /home/username/, /dotfiles/etc to /etc and /dotfiles/usr to /usr) and let it do its thing. Would it cause problems to also do that for configuration.nix?

On Arch I already had a /dotfiles/etc symlinked to /etc for my custom keyboard layouts, which worked fine... until the update which moved the location of the GUI keyboard layouts. It prevented the update so I undid the symlinks, updated, and put them again to the new location... but somehow it broke everything except the tty and no Wayland compositor I tried would work anymore (and there went my record of having never broken Arch since the first install over a year ago 😅 )

So I'm kinda wary of doing it on an even more critical file... but also I'm very lazy and having everything in a single repo is very convenient... How do you do it?

What are your favorite insane laptops?

Mine is the Dell Rugged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F56ION4_n0

Bump and fall proof, liquid proof, sand proof (and cat hairs proof I assume), extreme heat/cold proof, can be used as a blunt weapon in an emergency. Ridiculously overkill for anyone that's not a geologist working in Antarctica or an archaeologist in the Gobi desert, and ridiculously overkill is fun

What are the modern design trends you hate most? Feel free to rant! Mine are:

• Physical buttons are out of fashion, now EVERYTHING must have a touch screen instead! Especially if it makes the appliance more inconvenient to use. Like having to press a flimsy touch screen ten times to scroll through a washing machine's programs instead of just turning a physical knob and pressing a physical start button.
• Every website looks like it's made for a phone and was vomited by the same app in slightly different flavors of vomit. And then having the nerve to tell you to download the mobile app 😑
• Why does everything need to be an app by the way? Especially when the only advantage the app gives you over the website is that you're not constantly spammed with messages telling you to use the app... Are you making your website shittier on purpose so I feel like I have to use the app?... I don't WANT your app, you can shove it where the sun doesn't shine.
• Actually EVERYTHING looks like it's made for a phone... Like what's the deal with all those hamburger menus on DESKTOP software? Please just put a regular menu and same me some pointless clicking, it's not like you're lacking screen space. I especially hate that those menus can't be opened from the keyboard like regular menus. You know, "keyboards"? Those things that people on DESKTOPS use?
• All phones look the same. All laptops look the same. It's boring as hell.
• Laptops must be as thin and flimsy as possible. Bonus points if you can't even fit an ethernet port.
• I'm so sick of rounded corners everywhere... 😭

Personally I think that azerty was meant made by drunk students trying to troll people but it somehow caught on.

• Hey, qwerty is kinda bad... You think we could try to make one that's even worse to mock it?
• Oooh that'd be hilarious! Let's make a French version of qwerty but a lot worse!
• I know, lets put dead keys for all accents except for the accent aigu so that when you need it on an uppercase letter you CAN'T type it!
• Ahah good one! Let's also not add anyway to type an uppercase cedilla! Imagine, a French keyboard that can't type uppercase é and ç !
• And what if we rearrange all the punctuation and symbols so that the open and closed parenthesis are no longer next to each other? It'd be sooo funny!
• Right right! Let's do it too for the brackets and curly braces too!
• Good one! How about we don't add guillemets which are used in French instead of english double quotes, so that people will be forced to type double quotes and their advanced text editors will have to automatically replace them by guillemets so that the text uses correct punctuation for French?
• That's so sneaky! Let's also add § so you can cite your sources with the correct paragraph symbol, but not use real quotations marks for the quotes!
• What else would be really stupid?
• Let's use one key for a random greek letter!
• What?
• You know, like α and β?
• Ermm... okay... which one? α or β?
• Neither, people might actually use those once every 2 years. Let's just pick one at random!
• µ it is! Has anyone even seen that letter used in a French text?
• Nope, never, so it's perfect!
• How about also adding ¤?
• What the hell is ¤?
• I haven't the faintest clue! And neither do you or most people! That why it's funny!
• Sure, why not, let's cram pointless characters and not add actually useful ones like guillemets! Any other ideas?
• Let's put the hyphen on the one most unreachable key!
• Oh that's a good one!
• I got better! Let's put the period on the same key as the semicolon, but with the semicolon as the default character, and periods will be Shift+semicolon! That way we can say that it's canonically why French phases are long-winded: it's easier to type a comma or semicolon than a period!
• Man you're hilarious!

When I was still on Windows I put qwerty as my keyboard layout and used the Alt+number shortcuts for accents because that was less painful than using azerty... Those shortcuts didn't work anymore when I switched to linux so I had to find a real solution, which ended up being a colemak base which I modified to add accented letters. I don't like bepo, it moves z x c v and I like them being in the same place as in qwerty for the shortcuts I'm used to, and I didn't know qwerty-fr existed at the time 😅

Do you have worse for your language?

Hi ! I just made my first AUR package, which was really fun, and I was wondering what your own experience was like. Why did you decide to make your first packages ? What was fun, what was annoying ? What problems did you have ? Had you been using Arch for long ?

Mine was nothing complicated, just packaging a bash game with no dependencies made by someone else... because I wanted to try it and I was too lazy to install it from source 😅 Just the thought of having to manually check for updates and reinstall exhausts me and my adhd calculated that learning how to make a package would be less effort (never try to argue with adhd maths).

I did have some trouble because the game wanted its config and other files in $HOME and didn't create them directly (it was done by an install script run when installing it manually from source), but obviously I couldn't make the package create them there, which really confused the hell outta me. In the end the creator of the game kindly send me links to AUR packages that other people had done for his other projects so I could see what they had done and I did and did the same, which was to put the files in the locations recommended by the specs like /etc and /usr, and to added a post-install message telling the user to copy/paste some commands to copy the files in $HOME. It's a bit clunky but I guess it works 🥳

The fun part for me was learning more about how packages were installed, and the reason behind the specs. It's fine reading that packages shouldn't create files in $HOME but it doesn't tell me WHY. Also it's a lot more fun to try anyway even knowing it's a bad idea, just to see what kind of mess happens (turns out it couldn't install because /root/.config was missing 😂 )

If you had told me a year and a half ago when I switched to linux that I'd end up making a package, I'd probably have thought that you were crazy 😁

Hi, I tried using an email client over a year ago, and after trying almost all of them in the span of a week I gave up in frustration. Would anyone have a recommendation ? For an email client :

• That is actively maintained
• That is not controlled by a company that could pull a Mozilla on it (Thunderbird)
• That isn't proprietary
• That doesn't need 77 dependencies and 450 GB (WTF KMail 😭 )
• That is reasonably fast and light and not too bloated (I just want to read emails, I don't need a full app suite...)
• That supports POP
• That supports writing HTML messages (sorry Claws, I really liked you but occasionally I kinda need to write formatted messages to preserve other people's sanity 😅 )
• That supports reading HTML messages without showing the HTML version as attachments so that every single email has the paperclip icon and I can't tell which messages have real attachments (Sylpheed I think ?)
• That supports MailDir format for portability (why isn't it the default everywhere already instead of weird non-portable formats ? 😭 )
• If possible, that doesn't have an interface that's so awful it's a pain to find anything (Thunderbird)

I also tested Geary and another one but I don't remember much about it... I can't find out whether Geary does support POP and maildir, its documentation page is... well it's a list 8 lines long, but on a page called "Documentation" so it's technically counts as documentation I guess ? 😅 https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary/Documentation

Any recommendation would be greatly appreciated !

Comrades I challenge you to find the stupidest, most convoluted way to run a Windows app !

The rules are :

• You start with Windows and end with a Windows app
• All steps must be different, so no using 4 different VM software

Here is my entry, with a score of 9 beautifully stupid steps :

• Windows > WSL > WSL Wayland compatibility layer > Linux Wayland session > XWayland > QEMU > macOS > Wine > Windows app !

Can anyone do better ? I'm sure whoever get the highest score will gain eternal fame !

I'm curious, what do you do about VLC if you use a tiling WM ?

• Do you ignore the pain and still use a theme ?
• Do you not use a theme and live with it messing up your nice color scheme ?
• Do you just not use VLC ?

Hi, I am considering switching to NixOS and I was wondering what level of hassle I should expect for gaming.

I have been using linux for about 10 months so I don't know a lot yet. I am wondering if it is worth it to try gaming on Nix or if it is going to be way too much of a headache considering my limited knowledge.

I've had wildly different experiences trying gaming on different distros, and very differently from what I expected. It went from fine for a weird niche distro (antiX), to really awful for a distro supposedly "easy" and "good for gaming" (Manjaro 😑), to absolutely amazing gaming distro (Nobara), and finally to surprisingly good for a "don't try unless you are a Level 99 Tech Wizard dual-classed Zen Master you idiot" distro (Arch). So I really have no clue what to expect from Nix.

I really like Arch but my main issue is that I keep forgetting what I have already configured and how and with which settings, or I leave stuff partially configured because adhd then I forget it wasn't finished and where I was at, so using config files instead sound insanely more convenient and I've been wanting to try Nix for a while.

I'd be really glad for anyone willing to share their experience of gaming on Nix 🙂