Dilip's Log

Window Managers

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Desktop Environment gives us everything we would like to operate on Desktop with care towards UI and UX, that matches the common paradigm. It is a lot driven by mouse, and seems to fairly make work simpler and easier. It is not like keyboard can always make task quicker, mouse can be ahead of the race.

But I too followed the trend to ditch mouse and embrace the swiftness of keyboard. I like to hear the "clicks" and "tacks".

Window Managers are tools which only manage the window alignment and their behavior, with wayland, the compositor acts as both display server and window manager. Typically tho window managers offer keyboard focused, tweakable configuration to suit user's need, but alas it does work for minimal sake, just does offer on managing windows and thats it. It is not a Desktop environment to facilitate for other needs.

After fairly using a lot of window manager, from X11 days to now Wayland years, I stick with window managers only. It gives the feel of unique, self owned customization. My system can only be used by me, how cool !

Back in X11 days, I started with Cinnamon (Linux Mint) and later moved to XFCE to conserve Ram usage. Both were very good, Xfce was very much customization. Later I fell in the rabbit hole for more minimalism, and started looking at Youtube videos and came along the road of Window Managers.

Tried with i3wm, and boyo boy, it worked and made the workflow like charm, and again I feel into another rabbit hole of World of window managers. The cost I had to pay was, endless customization for my needs, and wasting time. After fair usage, with some free time (pandemic age) I tried out other WMs, like dwm, leftwm, Qtile & bspwm and used them all fairly equally and it was done.

With wayland years, I soon discovered sway was popular and drop-in replacement, so was suite of apps needed to replacement for pure wayland integration. Soon listed some and move to sway ship, and reddit showed beautiful blur and animations of hyprland, and finally I settled on with Hyprland.

So far I have only listen WMs names, and I have not spoken of personal usage and feeling towards each of them, cause, they all just do one thing and they do it well. So except for config file (syntax), there is not much difference for user who wants to use laptop and "do the work". It is a wonderful change to stick with WM, cause easy management of windows and minimal way of using the system, so I can use the saving part for demanding tasks.

One peculiar, and best thing WMs offer are Workspace. Which acts like spaces where windows are placed or configured, we get 10 (typically enough) or even more to organize and use our application in a handy way.

Closing words, Window Managers are definitely great, and changing enhancement, users (linux) should give it a try at least once, of course it's not for everyone, but how can anyone tell unless if they have not even tried. It can enhance the workflow for many, and can be worse for others.

So, just have a share of trial, explore and relax!

Nix: Home for Acer

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post am sharing some of the experience of using my new laptop, Acer swift Go Oled. Compact, Premium ultra-book with Oled, Yes, a good hand made mobile laptop.

As expected and as usual, it got windows 11 and first major encounter was heating and battery issue. It got me scared as it felt wrong decision. Since many claimed windows gives better battery life than Linux. It gave me nightmare of installing Linux too, really, new laptop with 4-5 hours of battery, for oled with black screens?

Anyways, windows made me really tinker to my needs, went on with winutils and de-bloated few stuffs and made it somewhat tacit for me, then too I demanded more of it. To which windows felt weird and too much to handle. Thus did finally decide to dual boot or straightaway to erase disk for Linux. My first thought of choice was to use Arch with gnome, but since I had well maintained nixos config, I went with same config without much a-due.

Viola it gave me the exact setup I was looking for, enabling my hand to feel back in pace. Yet I was worried about battery and heating point of view, although many say, laptops arent made to run on battery, yet the heat? the air exhaust hitting my oled display directly?.

I gave a shot to auto-cpufreq, it did a well decent job, yet I felt too little gain, I did change intel_pstate to acpu one. All i noticed is it lowered the max frequency rate from 4.3GHz to 3.2GHz.

Later on after many rebuilds, I saw Nixos wiki on laptop, may seem outdated, but it was legit, and I did enable service such as thermald, tlp and viola later on I noticed it works well. Seriously I don't know how, it gave me better battery life, less heating in Linux (nixos) than windows. Maybe magical to me as others claim vice-versa.

Nonetheless, nixos handled the magics of services and making it a better experience by just writing one line of configs to true;. My desktop runs Hyprland (wayland) and it works flawlessly.

Okay, let me tell you about Finger Print, it gave me little trouble, and funny enough, it was again just to say true; on a line.

I have FP, so obviously I wanted to be cool looking by using it, I initially did not expect FP to work, again online poeple said so. I was following some debian/ubuntu help on FP and enabling some drivers and all, it did not work. Later I gotta know that fprintd latest one already has the support for my FP id, so just did enable fprintd and viola! viola!, now I login in TTY with FingerPrint.

Although I wasted some time one tinkering and making it to work on my needs, I was not doing work I wanted, thus decided to settle and do productive tasks from then on. Anyway, whatever you customize it will be little to no gain. That's why I decided to make and get my blog going, it is better to make one day each month or on boring holiday to do cleaning and customizing on OS.

Finally, It has become a pleasant experience to get nix and make it work as I expected on Acer.

Yet one thing remains unexplored, fan controlling. I see no mention of fan or RPM via sensors command, so one way is to check another tool. I skipped that part, since I don't face heating issue or high fan noise even when I'm plugged in.

Ultimately one more thing making all experience better is the GOAT Emacs. Bringing back my config and using it with more speed is another level of bliss.

This has become another embark of a journey, where the todo's are just piling even more, and it looks fun to explore more and utilize efficiently for learning.

Nix Learning

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

NixOS is definitely an advanced Linux distro, but it ain't easy to understand overnight or like Archlinux to have easy manual, but it sure has alot on the table. There is whole bunch of families like Nix functional language, Nix package manager… so and on with the prefix "nix".

This is really confusing, many hate nix and are not convinced to go long run just because of this difficulty (mess?). To make a simple thing work as expected, you need to go through such a rabbit hole. But once you know Nix* (families), everything will make sense, and you would feel bad to go back to old traditional Linux manners.

These are some of the learning resources, which are rich in content and nonetheless, will be confusing at some point. But engineers do have spared their time in writing these, taking actions, to reach some audience and solve some of the caveats of Nix. So dig through and learn new ;)

nix-learning

Uncategorized

Nix Fundamentals (Video)
A Nix terminology primer by a newcomer - Stéphan Kochen
What Is Nix
Getting Started With Nix: Introduction - Nasir Hussain
Lightning Introduction to Nix for Developers - Robin Schroer
Nix(OS) Thoughts - ?
On-demand linked libraries for Nix - Farid Zakaria
What Is Nix and Why You Should Use It - ?
NixOS on prgmr and Failing to Learn Nix - Peter Bhat Harkins
Towards a content-addressed model for Nix - Théophane Hufschmitt
The easiest way (I've found) to create your own Nix channel - Luc Perkins
Debugging a dynamic linking bug in a Nix project - Jack Coughlin
adhoc executable patching on nixos - ?
Strategies for Binary Relocation In Functional Build Systems - Max McDonnell
How I Start: Nix - Christine Dodrill
I was Wrong about Nix - Christine Dodrill
Purely Functional Configuration Management with Nix and NixOS - Eelco Dolstra
Basic Use-Cases of the Nix Package Manager - Brandon Gottlob
Development with Nix: Python - Thomaz Leite
Dapp tools and the Nix package manager - Mikael Brockman
NixOS and Stateless Deployment - ?
Encrypted Secrets with NixOS - Christine Dodrill
Purely Functional Linux with NixOS - Joe Nelson
Nix + Bazel = fully reproducible, incremental builds - Mathieu Boespflug, Théophane Hufschmitt
Reflections On NixOS - Ian Denhardt
Hardening Compiler Flags for NixOS - Franz Pletz
Your home in Nix (dotfile management) - Hugo Reeves
My NixOS Desktop Flow - Christine Dodrill
Tailscale on NixOS: A new Minecraft server in ten minutes - Christine Dodrill
Setting up a git server on NixOS - Terin Stock
NixOS: For developers - Martin Myrseth
NixOS: Into the deep end - Martin Myrseth
A Tutorial Introduction to Nix - Rohit Goswami
Benchmarking nixpkgs builds - Jonas Chevalier
Recursive Nix experiment - Jonas Chevalier
Deploying Kubernetes apps with KubeNix - Jonas Chevalier
Nix - A One Pager - Vincent Ambo
Moving into NixOS - Gabriel Arazas
NixOS: the good, the bad, and the ugly - William G Hatch
Nix: A Reproducible Setup for Linux and macOS - Nicolas Mattia
Easy Peasy Nix Versions - Nicolas Mattia
Recovering Nix derivation attributes of runtime dependencies - Nicolas Mattia

<!– TODO: add more from their website –>

Nix By Example - Susan Potter
NixOps By Example - Susan Potter
NixOS By Example - Susan Potter
Inspecting Nix lambda function named arguments - Susan Potter

<!– TODO: add Tweag Nix flakes –>

Overview

A Gentle Introduction to the Nix Family

Nix the language

A tour of Nix - an introduction to the Nix Programming Language

Nix Shell

An introduction to nix-shell - Mattia Gheda
caching your nix-shell - Farid Zakaria

Nix Flakes

Building with Nix Flakes for, eh .. reasons! - Yannik Sander
Nix Flakes edition - Jonas Chevalier

Experience

Eight Months of NixOS - ash
Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit - Ruud van Asseldonk, Reinier Maas, Falco Peijnenburg, Fabian Thorand, and Robert Kreuzer

Language Specific

Java

Packaging a Maven application with Nix

Elixir

Using Nix in Elixir projects - Jean-Philippe

C++

Setting up a C++ project environment with nix - Jacek Galowicz

Rust

Managing Rust Dependencies with Nix - James Kay
- Part 1
- Part 2

Series

These links are extracted from humancalico's git repo (https://github.com/humancalico/nix-learning).

With that sorted, I hope learning becomes good ;)

Tools that are Best!

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Utilities that are Best! 🌟

Class	Name
Window Manager	Hyprland 🌸
Text Editor	Emacs 💮
Gtk Theme	Gruvbox / Orchis 🎨
Font	Comic Code / Comic Mono / Fira Code
Pdf Reader	Sioyek 📔 (ditch zathura)
Media Player	MPV! 🎬 (its MVP too)
Image Viewer	Imv 🖼️
RSS Reader	Elfeed 📰 (Again, Emacs)
Music Player	Ncmpcpp or Mingus in Emacs 🎶
Terminal	Foot via footclient ⚽
Menu/Launcher	Rofi 🚀
Notification	Dunst 🛎️
Shell	Zshell with Starship 🔰
Status Bar	Waybar 🍥
Favourite Color-Schemes	Modus-Vivendi + Gruvbox

Rest all other stuffs I do in Emacs, tbh I could do everything in Emacs lol.

Feel free to comment down and ask me doubts or about some improvements, you wanna inform! I will be glad.

My Linux Journey

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Small info/log on my linux journey and my experience.

If you are reading this, I encourage you to write blogs like this and have it in your git repo. Don't forget to tag or inform me, I'd be glad to read your journey too!

Linux is not widely recommended or discussed topic among real life friends or circle, every system comes pre-installed with win-dows, and its no big surprise people don't have a feel towards their usage of OS.

Not many people update their system, not many try to explore Alternative softwares, they stick very much to the default out-of-the-box Application. Tbh if you deep dive and understand windows, it is total crap, Obnoxious.

My reason to switch over to Linux was simple as other had :

No Freedom
Slow win-dows
Cannot even run the browser properly
Cannot even do multitasking efficiently
The bloatware crap were too much
Updates are like eternal sleep (No-sense updates)

My linux journey was from Linux Mint > EndeavourOS > Arch Linux > and now NixOS.

The Embark

I started to explore some YouTube video on Linux (as a normie at that time), soon I got familiar with good explanation, thankfully CTT had made an Linux Mint playlist and it helped to installing the first and the best Beginner Distro, the Linux Mint.

The gain and experience was Ultimate. Loved it, felt the Freedom, felt the deeper understanding of a real System.

I choose the flagship Cinnamon DE and it was very comfortable.

After few months, I finally stumbled upon a drawback here, it was stable packages (old package versions).

That is when I saw the concept of Rolling release, at that time EndeavourOS was the flavor of Linux distro at that time, peaked the distrowatch and all. So guess what, I installed EvndeavourOs and expanded more love towards terminal and latest packages.

Soon i felt i did not needed what all EndeavourOS ships, I want custom or DIY (something i take control of), then i realized, EOS was arch-based, so guess again, went with the great Independent Arch linux.

Boom, the best linux journey (learning), I only mean it for learning, other than that Arch is just cool kids bag.

Finally, now with some other jolt of distro trend, I stumbled the name "NixOS". It is somewhat reinventing the wheel, but it is so different that I'd hate to even say it as a Linux distro, It stands unique with linux distros.

Tbh I loved LM and Arch alot, I was a devotee to Arch too, and I hated Nix when I tried, cause things were weird.

You won't know where to start nor what to refer
Flakes or home-manager, How to understand?
Do nix-env or rebuild all the time?
What files to edit to achieve same setup as my previous distro? These were all the things that I hated and was frustrated about, there was still many things that felt hard. I did leave Nix and install Arch few times back and forth, I was debating with myself and id my own research all over Internet. That is when I thought nix lacked Documentation or good YouTuber to speak of, I really wish one of them could explain and make it their distro to explain timely on things. Fine, somehow forced myself and came a long way of setting up Good working nixos config, now I'm on flakes. Nix is great if it works as expected or if we make it work, but, if I get stuck or the issue goes for days that is when I really hate Nix, because it ain't easy to solve some unique issues. Most of these apply for HomeManager actually, it adds more trouble. It is adviced to learn how Nix works or Nix as Functional Programming Language.

Okay, so it was not about shilling Nix or anything, Just my Linux experience.