Working development system. I got quite far, but after so much work, became very frustrated when a VSCode plugin wouldn’t work properly because it needed (and assumed) read/write access. I didn’t want to have to manage and think about every little plugin I experimented with at the OS level.

I really wanted to like NixOS (and I do, theoretically), but I couldn’t dedicate more than 5 full days over Christmas to learn how to get to a working development system.

Very interesting. Do you have any more info about the relationship between 1080p/60hz and battery? It sounds intuitively true, I’d just like to learn more.

Very nice! I was just looking at reviews on this. Really nice machine in every way, except maybe for the camera, and minor points off for the display being “only” 1080p. I have a lovely framework 13", but am jealous of the Lemur’s battery life.

Thanks!

This is the case for me as well. I tried NixOS this weekend, and even though it has more adoption than Guix, it still does not have 100% coverage of all software I wanted. That said, the packages I did install were pretty up-to-date. I guess NixOS is as close to “critical mass” as we’ve got when it comes to this type of OS. But if I were a wizard devops type person with more time, I’d probably enjoy Guix more.

Given encouragement to try tmux, here is what I’ve come up with as a “one-liner” (script) that does what I was originally looking for:

#!/bin/sh

tmux new-session -d -s split_screen_grep \; \
  send-keys "/bin/sh -c '$1' | tee /tmp/split_screen_grep.txt" C-m \; \
  split-window -h \; \
  select-pane -t 1 \; \
  send-keys "tail -f /tmp/split_screen_grep.txt | grep '$2'" C-m \;

tmux attach-session -t split_screen_grep

I use it as follows, first arg is a command, second arg is a pattern to search for:

$ ./split-grep "cat big_file.txt" "tmux"

Thanks! I’m curious if there is a way to do this as a one-liner?

Elegant and flexible, thank you!

ChatGPT suggests the following:

1. Run tmux
2. rsync -naP --exclude-from=rsync-homedir-local.txt /home/$USER/ $BACKUPDIR/ | tee /tmp/rsync_output.txt
3. Ctrl+B % # splits screen vertically
4. Ctrl+B right-arrow-key # moves to right split
5. tail -f /tmp/rsync_output.txt | grep denied

Not quite a one-liner, but I can see how tmux is a big help here.

Keep an eye on Pop COSMIC. It isn’t ready yet, but I’d give it 4 months and I think it would be a great match for something like rpi.

Is it possible to get this to work with OBS studio? I see the author mentions OBS as an “Alternative Project” but it seems ideal to have these pieces work together.

This is really cool in concept, but it is SO SLOW. OMG.

I’ve started playing with Chimera Linux. Super interesting hybrid between BSD-like systems (ports, BSD-derived userland tools) and the Linux kernel, with neat design choices like LLVM compiler instead of gcc and musl C instead of glibc. I think of it as a next-gen Void Linux.

The short answer is “yes, but only as much as it needs to”. Flatpak had to make a decision between “do we guarantee the app will work, even with system upgrades” or “do we minimize space” and they chose the former. The minimum necessary dependencies will be installed (and shared) amongst flatpaks.

Have you had the unfortunate experience of a utility or program losing its packaged status? It’s happened to me before–for example fslint. I don’t think this can happen with flatpak.

It’s funny, I do almost the exact opposite–whenever there is a flatpak version, I prefer it over a built-in apt package. The flatpak is almost always more up-to-date and often has the features and bug fixes I need.

Examples:

• Vorta (0.8.12 flatpak; 0.8.3 apt)
• Pinta (2.1.1 flatpak; 1.6 apt)
• Minder (1.15.6 flatpak; 1.13.1 apt)
• Xournal++ (1.2.1 flatpak; 1.1.1 apt)

.

I don’t think it’s fair to expect the distro maintainers to be up to date with every software out there–the universe of software has grown and grown, and we just can’t expect them to wrap/manage/test every new release and version bump.

The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I’ve never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).

That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of “opinionated” good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it’s easy to go along with the “happy path” and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines–including machines not of their own brand. (I’ve contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they’ve always sent it through a code review and QA process).

Snaps are basically Ubuntu’s private app store, and flatpaks (the supported method of app distribution by almost every other distro) are not supported; there’s no tiling WM built-in for large monitors; the kernel is not kept up to date (i.e. improved hardware coverage and support); some things like streaming with OBS studio and Steam don’t work out of the box (this may have changed, but it was the case for me about a year ago).

When you’re just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don’t look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don’t distro hop just to see what you’re missing.

Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you’re trying to get work done.

Forces you to reboot.