Jason @peregrine@merveilles.town

Something not in the official repos? you can extend it locally OR use a community defined package.

Here is how you can play with orca in nixos https://nix-community.github.io/nur-search/repos/xe/

Actually not too different than my feels on nixos. Instead of asking me to learn a dozen tools, nix asks me to learn it's configuration language and then you or others build an abstraction.

Wanna change your desktop environment in nix? its a one liner https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-x11

Sway is pretty nice. I like that its one tool that can do nearly everything you'd expect a WM to do and one fully documented configuration file. No weird AF i3-gaps or rebuilding from source every change.

So far my review of nix: works great till you run into a spot thats not well documented. If you are lucky you find existing nix configs or a blog post to help.

BUT doing sway.enable = true is pretty magical.

Got sway/uxrvt/firefox working pretty easily.

Next up is fonts, sound and my editor.

Disconnected my rain downspouts from the city sewer, and connected my neighbour's downspout into my rain barrel. Feels good to accomplish small things.

Impossible to work knowing whats going on and the uncertainty of the future.

Tried building pantheon (the elementary front end) with nix on the pinebook and it failed due to missing arm dependencies.

Oh well. Maybe stock gnome?

The @PINE64 Pinebook Pro finally arrived. Its pretty neat, building nixos for it and the reddit thread suggests turning brightnessdown because it will draw from battery even if plugged in.

Looking forward to learning nixos on this device and then slowly apply elsewhere.

Hardware: Seems good, trackpad is not good, everything else is good.

And this is partially why I'm considering moving into Emacs. Maybe they've got stuff that works?

I don't have many options outside of "hackintosh" for my PC. So I'll stick with @elementary but lots of stuff doesn't work full stop and it is frustrating.

This past month of experimenting with various linux distros/window managers has really made me appreciate the base level of "works" that apple provides. Even if they have strayed pretty hard the past decade.

I would have never said the mac apps for email or calendar are "great" but turns out the OSS world seems to have abandoned all user facing applications?

And clearly apple has a team devoted to making all these non-apple bluetooth devices "just work" on ios/mac because windows/linux cannot.

Things that don't work or intermittently work on Linux and Windows, while also "just working" on mac, noting I haven't gone down the KDE route yet:

- Bluetooth anything
- Sound is very difficult apparently. Works for days then full stop decides to be done
- PDF editing
- email and calendar native apps, or reminders. gnome calendar/evolution send me notifications on UTC time.

Setup the altstore on my iphone and finally replaying some of those mario rpg games.

Today was a loss. But I did tidy up and clean the house and go for a short walk with my son. So i got that going for me.

Deno v1! https://deno.land/v1

Doom Emacs is pretty neat. I could maybe move into emacs permenantly as my dev ide.