gentoo-on-rpi-64bit VS nix

You're probably thinking of the now unmaintained https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit. He took a %dayjob% that required him to stop committing to open source projects or, possibly, just

64 bit with gentoo i think is slightly less supported; but that is just from me looking around the package archive, and what it appears to be from the wiki. Though i am in the process of taking sakaki's 64 bit image and moving it over to use the official gentoo repos, so i guess i am glutton for punishment

Last time I was looking into this, no normal 64-bit rpi distro (including alarm) supported it. There was only gentoo that somebody hacked together offering mmal interface for h/w codecs: https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit

You can build a binary distro based on Gentoo, e.g. https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit (sadly EOL'ed several months ago).

Anyway, from my own experience, the video decoding performance of gentoo-on-rpi-64bit was somehow nowhere close to LibreELEC, on the same hardware. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt there...

yes. use gentoo. specifically this version: https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit

This is very encouraging—I'm doing the same thing eventually on my Surface Pro (2017 model). Right now, I've just got it on a raspberry pi 4B 8GB. It works amazingly there, but I'm using a binary-heavy overlay and dwm. Firefox works better than I expected, but I haven't bothered with sound much, so I don't watch any video or anything. Also, the image I use (I use the “lite” variant available there) comes with an easy-to-use update tool (“genup”). At the very least, I consider it a great way to get acquainted with a significant portion of the Gentoo experience.

> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/9911#issuecomment-19252073...

As we covered in my last post, NixOS is a amazing Linux distribution for creating stable and declared environments. Now while this is amazing for a desktop setup, it is also perfect for a home-server or home-lab.

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Nix is a cross-platform package manager. It uses the nix programming language. Nix and NixOs are often used in the same context, but while the first is a package manager, the latter is a linux distribution based on nix.

Today I want to talk to you about Nixos. What is it? Nixos is a declarative and reproducible OS, partly taking the words used on their own page. What does that mean?

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

- it reduces bloat, because you can generate an environment or OS image with only the software needed to run a specific program or service

My guess is that a big efficiency gain would come from the second point, because you don't waste CPU on code that you don't use.

Does this make sense? Has anyone explored this?

[0]: https://nixos.org

1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity