Linux Thread

Lumeinshin · 2022-11-07T21:00:37+00:00

A general thread for linux users to talk about the software they like: I'll start with something very handy Cozy audiobook player Its basically the only aud...

WalkTheEarth

I use Calibre for my kindle to read manga

Space Banana

Pedestrian i wonder what people think of nixos here i think its the future but honestly i was completely filtered by it also its just not convenient enough for me for now.

I daily drove NixOS for a decent amount of time but I ditched it for Alpine Linux despite my dislike for distrohopping.

The good:

Declarative package managemnt
Reproducible system configuration from a single file
Massive repository, usecase for flatpak or third party binaries is heavily minimised
Biyearly stable release and rolling release both available
Both manual installation and calamares GUI installer
nix-shell for temporary packages and environments
Nix generations allow you to rollback an update that went wrong
Absolutely amazing icon (cosmetic)

The bad:

NixOS developers, maintainers and community managers are highly political and unstable to such a hostile level. Project stability and maturity are at risk because of this
Packages often break during updates, can happen even on the stable release. The system itself doesn't break but you are stuck from updating for 1 to 2 weeks
Some developer environments require a specific Nix setup unlike other systems
Third-party binaries will not run due to Nix not respecting the FHS specification (easiest way to fix it is by running them with steam-run)
Nix uses excessive amounts of CPU and RAM during system update
As you go deeper into the Nix rabbit hole, the returns are diminishing for an exponentially complicated tooling. For practical people who don't use what they don't have a usecase for, you won't even touch flakes or nix programming or custom nix shell environment files. I'm a developer myself and I used to do functional programming (until I went back to procedural) and I still never wanted to learn anything about nix programming.
Systemd-only
Nix was promised to improve its experimental FreeBSD support but it's still the same it was years ago, unusable. They focus too much on Mac support, so in a way it's similar to the problem of FreeBSD devs themselves daily driving macs rather than their actual system that needs to be improved.

The ugly:

NixOS is the ultimate SSD killer. Updating every 2 weeks made Nix pull approx. 30GB of package data on my machine every time because it re-downloads a lot of things that haven't changed in the system (and also includes a lot of stuff in the system in the first place) due to the whole immutable design. Arch and Alpine in comparison pull 100MB to 1GB of data when updated with a similar interval (most of the times between 150MB and 500MB).
Everything related to system setup, troubleshooting and /etc dotfiles needs to be done the Nix way, but if documentation is lacking for your specific usecase then you will find yourself stuck (I had to make a pull request to nixos-hardware repo to fix a module that is meant to power down Nvidia dedicated graphics on laptops and wasn't even powering off)
The Nix and NixOS documentation is incredibly atrocious and definitely one of the worst documentations I have ever seen in my entire life. They should have taken Java, Scala, Ruby or Elixir documentations as examples to follow

In the end I embraced the raw, procedural DIY nature of systems like Alpine Linux and the advantages significantly outnumbered the advantages of NixOS
Just like it was inspired by functional programming, NixOS suffers from similar issues in concept. It's good on paper and has many great concepts but in reality you would get 80% of its benefit if you use 20% of its features, and trying to purely do things in only the nix/functional way hinders you more than the good it brings. This is also one of the primary reasons my #1 language for personal use shifted from Scala back to Java.

Pedestrian

FHS non compliance is what really killed nix for me tbh. My friends basically only use nixpkgs as a way to get dev environments.

magicrabbit

I have neglected to mention in this thread that I am once again using Gentoo.
I find it hard to write this post as I can't really mention that without blogging about it, but I really don't like blogging so instead I'll provide some new software recommendations as I've radically changed my desktop setup more than a couple times since my first post here. Notably from a vanilla Fedora Workstation (with GNOME) setup for university to Arch with KDE sometime before I graduated, then I think MATE for a while, LxQt for a bit before switching that setup over to Gentoo with my own SerenityOS inspired rice and now a BSPWM setup just because I was tired of moving windows around.

BSPWM itself, not quite dwm, not quite i3, configuration is a shell script and it has no keyboard shortcuts (it instead tells you to install sxhkd, which is configured independently).
fooyin, a foobar2000 clone? I haven't ever used foobar so I can't say how true to it fooyin is, but it has served me well in place of my previously listed music player.
LocalSend, feels like magic to use, have used it every week ever since I installed it, essentially just a way to share files from one device to another in the same network.
Wormhole, basically LocalSend but not as local...? Also not as comprehensive, I don't think. I'm not sure it allows you to share multiple files at once like LocalSend does.
copyparty, can you tell I needed a lot of file sharing done? I found out about this one on r/a/dio's IRC, the dev's there often and I bothered to give it a try. I don't know what wizardry that guy's up to, but this was the only thing between syncthing, FTP, LocalSend, zipping files and uploading them to "the cloud", and some other nonsense that actually solved an issue I had with sending some images from my computer to my android which I still haven't figured out the nature of. Just don't connect to it over the internet, sharing protocols are already tennuous by themselves, copyparty uses all of them.
qimgv, is a nice little image viewer, it also supports webm playback which is neat. If you save a lot from 4chan you might love this one.
ranger, is a surprisingly good terminal file manager, I end up using Thunar more but the amount of things ranger can do is ridiculous.
LogSeq, is... I don't know, it's an alternative for Obsidian. I don't write very often even when I try to because I inevitably rely on my memory more than my ability to reliably journal day in and day out, which means my memory's been worked hard enough to not have to journal. Eh....... I still like the concept and write in it every once in a while, mainly because of the graphing view, that feature's cool.
GameConqueror, cheat engine for Linux. It's fun changing numbers.
Qalculate!, a great calculator, it warns you on ambiguities, it lets you speak English, and it has a terminal interface through "qalc" too!
RustDesk, Remote Access for all platforms, it's not too good, latency's way off and video quality is quite choppy, but it makes do.
ncdu, nice little filesystem viewer for the terminal to check what's taking up so much space.
Other than that... XLibre over Xorg, Polybar for my top bar, dunst for my notification daemon, rofi for a lot of things but mainly launching programs, maim for my screenshot tool.
Also, Moonbase Alpha's TTS has a Linux (and WIndows) build

sol

I have an old 2008 MacBook coming in the mail next week, going to see how well Void Linux will run on it. I was going to settle on a Thinkpad T61 but those things are unnecessarily expensive for what they are worth. The MacBooks don't have soldered ram and the hard drives are just as easy to replace, as well as 1/3 of the price! Plus it matches my iPod classic. This should keep me occupied until HyperbolaBSD is released...

I also saw someone selling a Corebooted MacBook of the same model and I thought that was quite funny.

As for what I have currently, just slapped Manjaro on my GPD Pocket 3 and haven't had any troubles since.

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