Dilip's Log

NixOS and its Madness

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Need to Update. WIP

Too much going on, need some time to wrap up.

I initially thought to talk about nix and nixos usage thing, but new drama has rose up regarding to sponsorship, governance and maintainers leaving.

So far Aux and Lix has been initiated, apart from nixos governance, using nix as dev environment and its steep learning curve is a hectic.

Someday might add new posts or update this regarding to nixos!

As on [2026-03-19 Thu], I think maybe things got dusted off. Interesting I was reading about a nix user giving Guix a fair try.

https://nemin.hu/guix-one-month-later.html

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Later on after many rebuilds, I saw Nixos wiki on laptop, may seem outdated, but it was legit, and I did enable service such as thermald, tlp and viola later on I noticed it works well.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 ;)

NixOS : Reproducible - Immutable

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction part, you would better have read it on official nixos site (https://nixos.org)

"Should you try NixOS?" ❄️

Here's an answer from a non-programmer, who just browses and watches media. Just don't, if you are looking for small benefit. Don't! regret having hard time to figure out petty things, again forget about error, you cannot even search in web.

But, if you have decided, go with it. According to me (non-programmer), these points are good to consider NixOS

You use Emacs (lol), Emacs ❤️ Nix is Match made in Heaven.
You want to declare stuffs and get same output, and forget what all you setup, cause its all declared in config.
You want an isolated environments (shell) to do some stuffs without involving whole system.
You want to stop troubleshooting and breaking update and are lazy to backup, and want to rollback with ease like with just a reboot.
You want to say I use Nixos Btw.
You don't want to worry about breaking your system nor fix something when you are updating system.
You are willing to learn (advanced) things and fine with steep learning curve.

How I manage my system 🌲

I manage my whole system with single org file. Its easy and pretty handy. You can read that file here ↬ d-setup.org , its both self documenting and has all source code blocks.

Another key feature in my setup is, every file i tangle is at read-only mode. So generally we can avoid editing/touching them. Thus, every action has to be made in d-setup.org only.

Also, I have made files to be symlink, so i can edit them without requiring to rebuild whole thing!

Credits 🎖️

These configs were the inspiration and helped to build this way.

I thank them sincerely.

Iron Shark ⟹ Made migrating to Single org-file config very easy.

Sioodmy ⟹ First config which I understand thoroughly and modified based on this.