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2 yr. ago

  • As always there's no such thing as a global "best" application. Building your system is a very personal thing. It all depends on your needs and liking.

    My personal journey in the tiling WM world has started 20 years ago with awesomewm. Then I moved to i3 because it feels lighter to me while offering a configuration approach I preferred. After some times, I felt ready to "really" build my tiling WM and I moved to dwm.

    I couldn't be happier until I came across bspwm which is as suckless as dwm but EWMH compliant. I also love the nice approach of keybindings offered by sxhkd. What I appreciate the most is the no limit configuration power since you can integrate the very powerful program that writes messages on bspwm 's socket (bspc) in any scripts you can imagine. This let you create some crazy and very personal rules. For example, I designed one where bspwm is listening to my video player state and if not fullscreen it automatically resizes it to a given size and moves it to a specific position. I have another one that will apply borders only to 2 specific windows applications and use a different color for each one.

    This is a very brief overview of what I've experimented. Your expectations and the time you want to deserve to your configuration may guide you on another path. Archwiki has a comparison of tiling WM may be a good starting point to help you in your decision.

  • Reflector relies on ArchLinux mirror status but limit the list you will end up using based on options like the country. This can already limit the "risk" even though the mirrors only grant you access to the packages so it's basically a list of URL.
    The risk will be to install untrusted packages or use "Siglevel=Never" if you have allowed such things in your system. Similarly if you use AUR it's highly recommended to check the PKGBUILD before installation.

  • You're spot on and that's what this discussion helped me figure out: I have no problem. I knew that but I also thought that NixOS would bring something new to improve my Linux usage. So far I still see such improvements for servers or deployment on several machines but not for a single user with standard needs (and this statement may be wrong and due to my limited experience with NixOS).

    But NixOS approach is quite different from others and I feel like I may discover something of interest to me once I learn more about it. Also, just for the sake of learning and discovering, I will continue experimenting with it for a while.

  • I use ytfzf to search/watch videos on YouTube, Peertube, Odysee.
    It has several add-ons including one for playlists. I didn't try it though.

  • Very nice explanation. I also recognize this point for NixOS.After reading so many comments, they all confirm what I've read before and I may realize that my real problem is already having a stable system which means not being in need for some "advanced" recovery options. That being said, I'm still curious and will continue testing NixOS.

    Not that I really have too much spare time but I do enjoy learning and tweaking NixOS. With its current development state, things are changing a lot so it can keep me busy for months. That's probably what I was mostly looking for: another toy to play with. Will see if I actually switch to NixOS at some point. Thanks again for your feedback.

  • That's indeed pretty neat.

  • Right, I totally agree. If I would have to deploy my config on several machines or create dedicated config using a common base then I would have been convinced. I'm still not convinced from a dummy single user point of view but I still believe in this distro and like its approach so I'll continue experimenting with it and we'll see where my journey leads me.

    At least for now I'm glad to have a new toy I can mess up with. With my Arch system I was getting this weird feeling where I was happy to have an efficient and stable machine while at the same time being bored to have nothing to test/tweak/destroy and rebuild. I mean I love to learn and discover new things so I experiment a bunch of applications and parameters I will never need anyway but it becomes harder and harder to find something that keeps me entertained for more than a day.

  • Or maybe I'm already too old for so much tech. But thanks for letting me think that I'm still a young boy ^^ Not helping with my question but pretty self satisfactory.

  • Due to the still early development of NixOS, Home manager is in some ways very similar to nix-env and flakes is still highly experimental. Also, the configuration parameters are changing quite significantly with the distro development. I'm sure this will all settle down when the distro will become more mature but to be honest that's also what attracts me. I like chaos ^^ Seriously, this shows me some potential for great achievements. I will continue testing NixOS but for now I didn't find THE reason to leave Arch yet. If I would have to deploy my config on several machines or create dedicated config using a common base then I would have been convinced. Will see where my journey leads me.

  • Great feedback, thanks! I've appreciated being able to replicate my system in NixOS within only few hours. I found NixOS actually pretty easy to take a grasp on, though I still didn't look at flakes in detail. You spot on the reason why I'm using Arch and a bunch of applications you can tweak to perfectly meet your own specific needs (neovim, neomutt, bspwm, rofi...).

    I love spending time to config them and to learn new things. This is basically why I'm interested in NixOS as well. Being entirely satisfied with Arch and not being a distro hopper, the fact that I installed NixOS means a lot to me but now I need tangible reasons to fully move to it. Maybe time will help me in my decision.

    All the great feedback in response to this post so far confirm how great NixOS is and I had no doubt about that. I may realize what it can bring me after some weeks of serious use. Thanks again for the time spent to write your feedback, very much appreciated

  • Thank you for this addition. I very much appreciate the fediverse community who is helping people to understand things, share their knowledge, and acting nicely (if we exclude some rare people who are clearly not used to live within a sane community). I've seen home manager but this raised one more question to me: what's the added value compared to stow for example? Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

  • I can see that from a server maintenance point of view. After having read so many great things about NixOS, I may have exaggerated my expectation and I may be the problem for being a user with too limited needs to get the full benefits of NixOS.

    For me this single config file doesn't save that much additional files and most of them would be files you configure only once during installation. Nonetheless I can see how "easier" it would be to save one file instead of 3 to reproduce your system and I can only imagine how much better it is from a server point of view.

  • Thanks for taking time to share this detailed thought. That's an interesting point I forgot because I didn't experience any related issues over 15 years with Arch but that's still a nice approach. I can certainly see why this is a big plus for NixOS.

  • Got it. So you can rollback without Internet access. I get that point and Arch can also do that with pacman -U. Again I feel like I'm just stupid and am missing something. Like I said I genuinely try to figure out what it is. NixOS would be the only distro I could consider switching to and that's why I'm currently testing it.

  • That's what I keep reading and why I would like to give it a try. For now I'm still confused how this is easier/more efficient than sharing your list of packages, restoring a backup, or using downgrade in Arch. I'm really interested because I like to try new stuff, especially if they bring something of interest.

    I really have hard time to see the difference for now after my first setup in a VM but also because imaging my full Arch system on a new machine 2 years ago only took me an hour and less than 10 command lines.

    Again, I'm genuinely trying to understand what I'm missing. From my reading NixOS seems to be the only distro I could switch to.

  • Can you elaborate? I messed up DNS when I started with Arch and it was easy to recover from that. For text editing, I'm using neovim and can go back with undotree. Of course, if I delete my file and remove it from the trash it's too late. Can you recover deleted files with NixOS?

  • Personally I use reflector like so:

    reflector --verbose --country "United States" -l 200 -p http --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

  • Enjoy the new rabbit hole you just fall into :) 3D printing is really nice and can be helpful sometimes too. I've printed some good stuff from Thingiverse or Printables before starting to create my own simple designs. You save money at some point and you have more fun than going to the store or ordering online.

    It's also great to be able to say: it's not perfect but I made it ;)

  • Glad it can be useful.

  • If there may be no risk in using Apparmor misconfigured, it's still useless and not a good practice to use apps this way. Overall, this was more a general advice because other apps may have more negative effects when not properly configured. It's good to set up good habits from the start and stick to them.

    I've built my answer based on the use-case you exposed (i.e. not using untrusted packages). As I said, if you are now planning on using untrusted packages, you should configure your system appropriately.

    Re: AUR, it's quite safe. In theory it can be harmful but only if the user is not careful. You should always inspect PKGBUILDs and *.install files when building packages from the AUR (the pacman wrapper you use to download from AUR should have a dialogue which prompts you to do this). I have personally never experienced any troubles using packages from AUR (and I have quite some) because the community is usually pretty vigilant but also because I use only packages maintained for long time by known developers.

    Hope this helps. You can learn more by reading the arch wiki (which is recognized to be the best one so use it at your advantage) and by doing simple searches on the arch forum. Both resources were dramatically helpful to me understanding what arch is, how it works, and what to expect when I started using it 15 years ago.