dotfiles VS pkgbuilds

I'm in the middle of switching now, from Silverblue. It's a lot of fun. The Arch wiki to do something will have you changing three files and restarting 2 services, while with NixOS you add a line to your config and you're done. And when something doesn't exist as a Nix package/config, it seems somewhat easy to build your self (compared to other package managers, at least). I realized there's no "game-devices" package last night, for example, but I was able to get this working in about an hour of Googling:

https://github.com/pkulak/dotfiles/blob/nix/nix/gamedevices....

Still not all the way in. Like, I'm still going to use Chezmoi for my home directory because I don't quite see the value-add of Home Manager, but who knows; maybe I'll be a super fan next year and move everything over.

Fonts were always a PITA for me too, until I realized you can just drop whatever you want in ~.local/share/fonts. Then you can even track them with whatever dotfile manager you use and always have them available on every machine you use, immutable or not. There's zero need to involve a package manager.

I just have a wrapper script that I run instead of sway itself.

That doesn't fly with me. I just use Alacritty and re-bind the keys so I can still use ctrl-c and v:

https://github.com/pkulak/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/alacr...

Getting environment variables from systemd generators, so they only needed to be set for the systemd user session (environment.d, custom generators), and they cover this way also systemd user services, systemd-run and flatpak-spawn. Also, bash-complete-alias is pretty neat, though I'm making limited use of it these days, and prefer wrappers, and symlinks.

And here's a more advanced one.

You can use 30-systemd-environment-d-generator to read and then export them, here's an example.

If you're using ranger then you might also want to set TERMCMD. I don't remember what it's used for, maybe for launching new terminal windows from ranger. There are HW video acceleration vars, I set them dynamically with a systemd environment generator.

ttf-liberation as the bare minimum, with a gschema override and proper provides array in a PKGBUILD to avoid both adobe-source-code-pro-fonts and cantarell-fonts.

The whole mess is in my pkgbuilds repo, so feel free to look around and ask.

Ignore everything that starts with my/uosys-mods-. Also, everything that starts with my/ is personal packages, you can replace them with the original upstream packages. For reference: flatpaks, pkgbuilds.