nixos VS org-pdftools

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...

An alternative is to open PDFs, from Zotero or from anywhere else, with Emacs' pdf-tools (https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools). If you annotate the pdf, those annotations are part of the pdf. And you can also use org-noter (https://github.com/weirdNox/org-noter) and org-noter-pdftools (https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools; but see https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools/issues/93#issuecomment-1493314118 if you use the new org-noter from https://github.com/org-noter/org-noter).

Periodically, I go through the pdfs I've read (I have a collection in Zotero for the stuff I am in the process of reading) and I use org-noter-pdftools (see https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools ; this is different from, and extends and depends on, org-noter which, by the way, has recently got new maintainers) to extract all annotations in the pdf to a note that is associated to each pdf. One to one mapping here: one pdf file - one .org file for notes. These notes are basically just org(-roam) files that store the annotations for easy searching (see below) and to allow my linking to specific, individual, highlights (or text annotations). I think that initially setting everything up to my satisfaction was a little bit confusing (e.g., the names of some functions I think are the same between org-noter and org-noter-pdftools and sometimes it was unclear to me the differences in functionality between the two packages); but now it works flawlessly. From org-noter-pdftools I specially like how easy it is to get all the highlights, text annotations, etc (not manual scribbling, of course, and see also below for "typewritter" annotations) into an org-roam note that links directly to the exact location in the pdf.

Check out my screencast on org-noter. I don't think anything else comes close to this kind of workflow. Unfortunately it's not production ready yet. There's a related project org-noter--pdftools, I don't recall what it's state is.

First I tried config from here - https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/19686/how-to-use-pdf-tools-pdf-view-mode-in-emacs but the package in unmaintained, so I used https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools

[2] https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools