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I just started yesterday in a VM. It’s no stress and you can easily put your configuration on metal after. Pretty fun stuff.

Agreed, but I found getting NixOS the way I want it, to be super overwhelming, and documentation simply sucks. I’ve been thinking of forking ZaneyOS (Link: https://gitlab.com/Zaney/zaneyos) and basing my NixOS config on it. Otherwise, it’s just too much.

My drive to nix was so I could simply manage what packages I had installed with a text file. If I removed something from the file, I expect it to be uninstalled. I never found a tool/wrapper for apt to do this.

If you want to start with nixos, I would take whatever distro you are on and install nix and then home manager. Then, you can slowly migrate your user configuration over without starting from scratch. That worked really well for me going from ubuntu to nixos.

I tried it a while back, thought it would be good for my servers, but at the end of the day I found that it was a lot of learning for a very small benefit that could be achieved differently. Instead I focused on learning Ansible which also allowed me to write configs to deploy lots of services to my servers. I still want to learn Nix at some point, but I feel it’s a lot less important if you have an Ansible playbook that does the same thing and even more for any distro you might care to install.

You don’t have to know how it works in order to use it. I don’t know either but I could host services using docker. trust me it’s way easier than it seems.

Docker, how they work?

I’ve been using linux on and off for 20 years and docker reignited my interest for running linux. There’s plenty of good guides and free courses, if you need help finding one - let me know and I’ll send you a YT playlist.

its counter intuitive to learn but a godsend after you learn it

How to docker-compose in thirty seconds.

Simply make a file called

compose.yaml

Then paste in the text from your application’s docker-compose instructions.

Often the timezone needs to be set, along with the volume

Example:

volume: /mnt/hdd/data:/data

This means the application’s data directory will be mounted at /mnt/hdd/data

Then

docker compose up -d

You’re done, that’s all there is.

docker-compose is fantastic because in a single compose.yaml file you can list multiple services.

For example, my compose.yaml file contains my sonarr/radarr/bazarr/lidarr/prowlarr/qbittorrent/deemix/jellyfish/jellyseerr

And I can update them all by running a shell script made of three lines.

Docker compose is amazing. I don’t even know how many things I’m running right now. Hell I’m running things I didn’t even use! (I could easily disable or delete them; I’m just lazy)

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Bcachefs has filesystem encryption without LUKS? Did this have an audit? I use BTRFS and it is fine, but boot is unencrypted (using TPM would be cool)

Bachefs is in the kernel now so trying it on a spare drive or partition is super trivial these days depending on distro. You only need a few minutes of time.

Getting it on root is a bit harder as almost no installers support it yet. The only distro I can think of is CachyOS.

Haven’t used neovim, but I had to try vim way too many times. I can’t use anything else now.

Try kickstart.nvim. I was skeptical until I tried it. It’s a very good starting point for Neovim. Pretty much eberything else I’ve ever tried is either too bloated, too complicated, too outdated, too overwhelming, or a mix of the above. Link: https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim

If you aren’t already, you could get familiar with the vim motions within VSCode via a plugin. Moving over to a vim setup can be overwhelming, setting up your lsp,linters, other packages. Adding on the need to still learn key bindings makes it extra difficult. I started with VSCode using vim motions, went to doom emacs and used evil mode and then my mentor got me hooked on vim. Do it in steps and you’ll get to a config that lets you code without much fussing, good luck!

I just moved from Neovim to Helix. I think it’s worth considering, especially if you don’t know the keybindings yet. Plus, Helix is probably easier to learn.

I used neovim but recently switched to helix and highly recommend it. If you haven’t tried nvim yet, give helix a try before deciding. A good way to compare is do the tutorial of each and see which you like more nvim +Tutor and hx --tutor (orhelix --tutor).

If you’re a current vim user the helix keybindings are only a small learning curve after the tutorial, and feel a lot smoother imo

That’s me as well, I’ve used vim for simple edits over the years but more and more just used nano for most of my terminal based edits. Finally ran vimtutor (mainly because I wasn’t aware of it) and wow, I should have done that years ago.

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The learning curve is absolutely colossal, especially if you want to use it as a full IDE. Even with the legend panel it still doesn’t tell you have the story

That’s my first time hearing of Lem—it looks fantastic. What’s the issue with it on NixOS?

A fine day that will be!

Wayland here as well, but I don’t see compositors having xmonad functionality that I need

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You might want to look into River, a tiling Wayland compositor inspired by xmonad. Disclaimer, I’ve not actually used xmonad before so I’m not in a position to compare the two. But River is configured entirely through riverctl commands. Its “config” is an executable, by default at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/river/init but you can point it to a different path, which can technically be any executable file that just executes when River starts. Ordinarily it’d be a shell script calling all the riverctl commands you want to get your River set up the way you like it, but it could be any executable you like really. You can also use other languages other than shell scripting.

It’s still in pretty early development, but I daily drive it for my main general-purpose machine and it works completely fine. I use it for web browsing, coding, gaming, chatting, general productivity, etc, all works. I’ve noticed some minor hiccups but nothing breaking or unusable. Tbh I would say it’s more stable than Hyprland which I’ve also used and have noticed that Hyprland updates (especially from git) would frequently break it, whereas I was running River compiled from the latest commit of master branch for a while and never had an update break things.

I think the new Wayland fork will fix that

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And they use extremely bad coding practices

Perhaps you are a more discerning filesystem user than I am, but I don’t think I’ve actually noticed any difference on btrfs except that I can use snapshots and deduplication.

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Zsh

FWIW, the excellent ZSH Quickstart kit has been splendid for my transition.

Have you tried zed? Written in rust, has many extensions. I gave it a try, I quite like it. It’s blazing fast. But I haven’t tried on an old machine.

I’ve always wanted to contribute to an open source project but by the time I get done with the grind of the work day I don’t have the mental energy to effectively work a second job competently.

For what its worth, I know that while a lot of the hardcore Linux community seems to absolutely despise Ubuntu/Canonical because of snaps and whatnot, I don’t think there is anything actually wrong with using Ubuntu if that is what works for you. Use the best tool for the job!