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MangoWCurious So since I got back on the window manager game I’ve been on Hyprland as it was super easy to install, works pretty much right out of the box, and the pain points of how to get some system things like Wifi and brightness control working are something which I’ve become familiar with. Wayland having a compositor as part of the way it works is sweet because things like blur and animations (gol don’t like these but they’re a good example) work as defined in the Hyprland configuration files as opposed to a separate program running to render those things in X Server. ...

20 Years?! This is bad, it’s actually over 20 years now I think and I’m not even that old actually, 29 at the time of writing this. That’s a long time to have tinkered with Linux. I’ve essentially grown up with it now. These tools and I have come to maturity (or lack there of) together through the years and I think it’s interesting now looking at the state of the actual tools themselves as well as, lets say the ‘community’, around this grouping of utilities we have come to know and love as Linux, or actually GNU/Linux, today. ...

Typing Oh yes, I love it, you love it, we all do it, I have been a strong believer in that the things we use every day should be the ones you spend time learning about or looking into quality examples of. The modern world has us typing every day to some degree or another and so it only makes sense that you and I would have different and strong opinions about the tools we use to do said aforementioned typing. Out of all the computer related rabbit holes one can get sucked into, the tool you use to interact with your computer in the first place, the keyboard, seems like the most obvious one for the normal “I don’t care about computers I just use one” crowd to get at least semi interested in. ...

The Rain is a Vibe Seattle is a strangely in tune with Hifi sort of town actually. It’s not immediatly obvious but once you start looking around with a bit more specificity than “speakers” or “stereo” you slowly find more and more people interested in bispoke and niche Hifi gear. I don’t think there are many other places in the US with such a high density of places where you can go listen to one off speakers/amps and the like! ...

This why flakes start to shine! Initially I had this section at the end, but in this case putting the conclusion at the beginning here might help motivate someone to try this for themselves. The crux of the situation is that the flake.nix file defines the package versions and ‘channels’ so to speak. It’s like a level higher than the configuration.nix. You import your configuration.nix as a module into the flake. Now you can rebuild –flake and that means 1. you don’t have to switch channels first to get the same options as I have defined and 2. all the versions of stuff are exactly exactly the same, meaning once you switch into what you’ve built it will match the last time the repo was written without any doubt. ...

Word Processing? A classic predicament. Using MS Word or Google Docs is painfully slow, requires internet, and all your sensitive information along with your family’s is sent off to American mega corporations. Alas, but what else can one do? I’ve written about this before generally as far as making documents with Vim, here I’m hoping to keep track of the practical tips, tricks, and settings/plugins which add to the experience of using ViM as primarily a writing tool. Generally, at least for me, how typing things out usually goes is: ...

The Final Config…. maybe One of the main things, obviously, used is the browser. I’ve been on Firefox for ages and ages now and don’t really have too many complaints. It seems a bit heavy but it isn’t Chrome at least and I like that it’s the other web engine. Plus it’s been the Linux standard for a while now. That being said, there are obviously a few settings I like to change upon a fresh install. On NixOS you can install Firefox, great, but then you still have to manually go in and add some extensions, move the tabs to the side (Oh I’m sure glad they built that in now) and stuff like that. ...

What on earth? Ah, of course as soon as I start looking into something like this it becomes a huge rabbit hole. This time around though, not sure if it’s because I’m reading more, or just because I’ve now been around the block so many times it makes more sense, but this wasn’t too painful. Looking over how the word of Vim has changed since it all being VimScript and Plug being the new thing, Lua has taken over and this has allowed heaps of neato new extensions and stuff to be built. How nifty, except I’ve’nt the slightest clue on how to use any of that inside my archaine configuration which I’ve just shoe-horned into my /etc/nixos/configuration.nix for the last however many years. More than 10 at this point. ...

Ah, yes I’ve switched There has been for years a lot of talk about issues with Xserver and it’s wide spread defacto use in Linux. Mainly due to the momentum effect, Xserver (originally designed for mainframes and actual terminal interfaces with them) has been used on Linux since, well, the beginning. That’s fine and all, I mean whatever it works. The issue arrises where now people have hardware which was built in the last 20 years claiming to be “modern”. Or maybe you want to watch a movie on your computer without tons of screen tearing caused by whatever protocol was written for plain text to work over the 1080s network Xserver is hoping for. ...

Hyprland Managin’ dem Windoz I’ve written about the Wayland thing before, here I’m just talkin’ about my Hyprland configuration so it can be replicated later. I’ve tried to keep this as simple as possible without a ton of extra utilities and what have you as it becomes rather difficult to manage the fancier you make it. You can do on the fly color scheme matching to dynamic wallpapers in animated menus from quick access bars and stuff ya ya great but I’m just gonna stick to what works. ...