juipeltje

I think rmpc can do this too, which is an mpd client with album art support, but it’s terminal based and requires some manual configuring. I’ve been buying CDs over the past couple of years to get rid of streaming as well, and i think i’m finally ready to cut the cord. I’ve been experimenting with different music players but ended up ditching mpd. I like to be able to switch between audio outputs easily, like alsa or pipewire, and since mpd is configured through a config file it kinda sucks for that. I also like to be able to play CDs directly, eventhough i have ripped them all, but i haven’t been able to get any terminal player to play a cd, except for mplayer, which is too minimal for my taste. At the moment i’m really liking audacious. Also tried deadbeef and strawberry, but deadbeef doesn’t have mpris support ootb, and strawberry feels a bit bloated to me. Audacious feels like a nice middleground. Audacious does support viewing lyrics but not synced from what i can tell unfortunately.

Yeah in that case you probably want something else. So far i’ve only ever used it for text based questions. I think i remember seeing that there is also a webui out there but i don’t remember the name.

So far i’ve really liked just using ollama in the terminal since it just spits out text anyway.

Declaritive postmarketOS

For me it’s pretty basic. It’s mostly aliases for nix related commands, like rebuild-switch, updating, garbage collecting, because those nix commands are pretty lenghty, especially with having to point to your flake and everything. I’m thinking of maybe adding an alias for cyanrip (cli cd ripper), because i recently ripped my entire cd collection, but going forward if i buy another cd every now and then, i’ll probably end up forgetting about which flags i used.

Gekoloniseerd. And personally i’ve also been considering air cooling my cpu again just to switch it up a bit and see what it’s like, plus on linux it might make my life easier because i can just let the bios control the fan speed instead of relying on reverse engineered open source alternatives to get it to work. I don’t think i’ll buy a new cooler until my current aio dies though. I’m pretty sure i’ve had it for 6 years now and it’s still going strong.

If i remember correctly you can pass a txt file to pacman when installing packages, but i could be wrong. There is also BlendOS, which from what i can tell has an immutable base, with a toml config on top of it to install the additional packages you want. Never tried it myself though. I also use NixOS because i wanted to be able to reproduce my riced out system more easily if i have to reinstall. I do wish this space had some more competition, because it might make this way of running a distro more approachable. The closest thing i’ve seen aside from guix is probably those ublue customized images that you can build, but i’m not sure how comparable that is.

If you prefer stacking then maybe wayfire is worth taking a look at. It’s a stacking compositor but it has eyecandy as well.

Ah i see. I also use NixOS but i don’t use any printers, so i don’t know much about that either.

Does fedora not have an option to run an LTS kernel or something, like arch does? That might help, unless you really need certain things that are only in the newer kernels.

Yeah like other people mentioned, guix is great but in terms of how it works it’s pretty much a libre lisp version of Nix, so you have to actually be interested in that type of system where you configure everything declaritively through a programming language. I personally use NixOS because i’m not really into the libre stuff, but i really love this way of configuring my system, but be prepared to spend months on learning and configuring depending on how far you want to take it. I don’t know much about parabola, but if i’m not mistaken i thought it was similar to arch but libre, so it might be a better fit if you just want to use a more traditional linux distro that is also libre.

I initially tried linux mint and ubuntu when i was like 13 on my laptop, which is almost 15 years ago now. At the time it wasn’t because i hated windows, but my monkey brain was just interested in it because it looked so much different. After i realized that i couldn’t just use all my windows programs like usual (and especially gaming wasn’t nearly as good back then), i quickly went back to windows. Fast forward to 2020, at this point i had started disliking windows mainly because all of it’s creepy questions when you install it, like wanting your handwriting information and all that, but at the same time i thought “well what can you do about it?”. Then i saw the LinusTechTips video about trying linux instead of windows 11. This was the first time i had actually thought of linux again in all those years. The video convinced me to give it a try and i started with PopOS. After a few months i moved to arch cause i liked the idea of customizing my distro more from the ground up. Stayed with arch for 2 years, then i got the distro hop virus. Tried a lot of them, fedora, opensuse, ended up staying on Void linux for over a year in total. Now i’m using NixOS and very happy with it, and i think i’m finally settling down on a distro. I know LTT gets a lot of flack for how they handled the linux challenge, but if it wasn’t for that initial video back in 2020, i would have probably never given linux another try. And with valve investing so much into improving wine and dxvk and all that, it was viable for me to switch as a gamer.

You must be a mac user then because it doesn’t make any sense to have that criticism as a windows user lmao

Pretty sure it’s mice for both, that’s just the correct plural for mouse, and the computer mouse literally got it’s name from the animal.

If you’re not afraid to dive straight into minimalism/command line, void linux could be a good choice, especially if the laptop is 32bit because void still has 32bit repos.

I would say willingness to learn and to compromise. And by compromise i’m mainly talking about trying to find alternatives to software that might not exist on linux, and see if those work for you. And if you end up finding a piece of software you need that really has no good alternative to what you need, you can always either go the virtual machine route, or the dualboot route, but i personally think that should be considered a last resort.

Yeah, i’m realizing more and more how convenient those variables are. I recently started using gtklock for example, a screenlocker that also has separate modules for extra functionality, which are also in nixpkgs, but the problem is that you have to explicitly specify the path to those modules in the config. So i wrote the config inside of home manager, and pointed to the modules path with the pkgs.foo variables. Worked like a charm.

I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn’t like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I’m hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it’s a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.

I think nix being slang for nichts is a coincidence, because it actually comes from the dutch word “niks”, which also means nothing. I think this is mentioned on the NixOS website somewhere.

Fair enough. I wasn’t aware you actually had that problem yourself, i thought you just looked it up to prove a point lol. I do think it’s a weird decision that niri doesn’t just have xwayland built-in. Even river has native xwayland support, which is much more focused on minimalism. I haven’t used niri all that much because so far haven’t really been able to get used to scrolling. I think i still prefer dynamic tilers with a layout system. I should probably try booting up a game in niri to see if i can replicate it.