nixos VS intellij-community

I enabled the pstate driver yesterday for my T14s gen3 (AMD). It almost doubled my battery life, the fan never spins anymore and it's very very quiet and cool now. You need to specifically enable it in Linux kernel, this is how I did it:

https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/commit/17e8a9e2ce4b0f34ef6cf...

It should also be used together with the `shedutil` governor for the best results.

Wayland support didn't make it... Oh well it is in version 29.

I've been using the wayland version with libgccjit many months now from their git repo and it is extremely snappy and stable editor.

My strategy to keep all of this together is a nix derivation that compiles the latest master branch with all the plugin. Oh and my config is an org file with clear comments...

https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/tree/main/desktop/emacs

All reproducible...

Btw. I recommend SystemCrafters video series Emacs from scratch. It teaches how to make a vanilla emacs to work like doom emacs does. It was helpful for me to understand the magic behind doom...

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEoMzSkcN8oPH1au7H6B7bB...

I kind of have a thing for ThinkPads, and I have three laptops with NixOS:

- ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2018 model. Even the fingerprint reader works with this one. And fractional scaling for the 4k monitor! Config: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/blob/main/hosts/purrpurr.nix

- ThinkPad T25. Everything except the fingerprint reader works. https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/blob/main/hosts/muspus.nix

- ThinkPad X230: Everything works here. The classic workhorse. https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/blob/main/hosts/meowmeow.nix

I never tried anything else except ThinkPads just because I'd miss the TrackPoint a lot...

I used to dread setting up printers on any operating system. I've done it countless of times with Linux, Windows and macOS, and it's been quite common to have some kind of fight with the printer until I get my paper out.

Only recently, by buying a Brother laser printer at home, and setting all my machines to use NixOS, I haven't been needing to think about printer problems anymore. All I need is this piece of config, and the printer will Just Work with the new computer:

https://github.com/pimeys/nixos/blob/main/modules/home-servi...

I did a month, diving directly into the deep end with flakes and all. I don't know, it really is hard in the beginning. Like, really hard. But eventually I got myself a setup I could use in my two laptops and workstation. A setup, that sets my home directory, all my programs and my custom desktop just the way I want. Everything is in the github repo, and installing with the flake will give me the exact experience I have in my other machines.

I tend to use lots of custom tools and commands, that are really painful to install and setup for a new machine. With NixOS all of it is just one command away.

But, I agree, it is REALLY HARD in the beginning to grasp things.

Here's my configs if you want to see how I approached my own setup: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos

And I come here always to remind people in the Apple bubble, that there are big groups of us who are not thinking like that!

I'm also soon in my 40s and I had my Apple years between 2004 and 2010. I came back to Linux and kind of hate the word tinkering even. The current Linux system offers something that nobody else does: your own desktop just how you like it.

I have my configs in GitHub: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos

With this config, I can take any ThinkPad (that are plentiful, great HW and cheap), boot from USB and get the same exact desktop experience I've had for almost a decade now in twenty minutes.

And what kind of desktop? A minimal tiling window manager on top of Wayland. Exactly the applications I need. The same wallpaper as always. The same editor, the same browser, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same kernel params, the same internet setup. Sound? Always worked. With PipeWire, it even seems to work better than on my Windows installation (and replacing PulseAudio with PipeWire was a one line config change).

Now. There will be no product manager somewhere that will dictate how I use my computer. If something changes in my workflow, that comes from my configuration. Nowhere else. No advertisement for new products, no suddenly disappearing applications. If something breaks from an update, I just boot to the version before I started them and I'm back to the previous state. When updates are leaving me to a state I'm happy about, I commit them to that GitHub repo and they will work exactly the same until I decide to update again. And I run the master branch of NixOS which is breaking sometimes, and it's still much more stable experience I ever had with OSX...

Of course this is not for everybody, but please understand when celebrating the commercial offerings how there's so many of us who do not want a desktop experience dictated by product managers. Who are kind of conservative how our workflows should stay the same for years, or decades. And we are still super productive, doing our work and very happy using Linux.

I'm going to copy&paste this comment to every single Apple post from now on...

Also, no BuSL stupidity, they're all Apache 2 AFAIK: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23...

And the "all you can eat" toolbox license is just a staggeringly good deal, IMHO, which also comes with a "you can keep your license forever, just no updates" which is way different from setting subscription-based licensing money on fire when your license expires. Whoever came up with that should be applauded because it really drives down my "what about" anxiety of paying subscription money for IDEs

I readily admit I am not familiar enough with fossil to know about the impedance mismatch, but I'll point out that https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/tree/idea/241.... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... may a long way toward finding how they think about those operations

There is quite a bit going on in our view’s class, so we'll take it slow and go through its functions one by one, according to their importance. The first thing we need to do is to create the structure our items will fit into. com.intellij.ui.treeStructure.Tree seems to best match our needs, and that’s what we’ll use. In order to prepare it for what is coming, we need to configure it.

I think it's time to wrap it up. We've made a pull request to the IDEA developers, and I've accomplished the tasks I set out to do. I'm really happy to help the developers of my favorite IDE.

I offer, again, my JetBrains GrammarKit counterpoint from the last time that assertion came up <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38192427>

>>>

I consider the JetBrains parsing system to be world class and they seem to hand-write very few (instead building on this system: https://github.com/JetBrains/Grammar-Kit#readme )

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... (the parser I'll concede, as they do seem to be hand-rolling that part)

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... (same for its parser)

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23...

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/blob/idea/233.... and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/blob/idea/233....

I had the same experience with OmniGraffle, https://www.omnigroup.com/omnigraffle

It just worked. There was support. I wouldn't dig a hole in the ground with my bare hands, why wouldn't I use good tools. Of course I would like to use F/OSS for various reasons.

The model I absolutely love is Jetbrains, their core product is OSS, Apache licensed. The whole thing, totally usable. https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

The money I send their way does both, it pays for developers and it puts an amazing artifact in the world that others can use and learn from. If they weren't open source, I wouldnt pay for it. I don't know how many others are the same as me, but Jetbrains really deserves credit here.

# https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/233.9802.14/json/src/jsonSchema/schema.json#L52

and also FOSS (Apache 2): https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community (as well as PyCharm found in the "python" subdirectory)