ros2nix VS nixos

Thanks for the response!

> This is difficult to answer without knowing more details.

The situation specifically is the ROS ecosystem, where metadata is managed in these package.xml files:

https://github.com/ros2/rclcpp/blob/master/rclcpp/package.xm...

The federated nature of the ecosystem has led to a culture where it's very normal to be building dozens of these at once, in the same workspace together, often from multiple repos (the repo above has four in it). So there are several build tools which automate the work of examining a source workspace and building all the packages within it in the correct topological order, respecting build_depend tags. The newest of these tools (colcon) has actually made the package.xml optional in many cases, as it can examine CMakelists, setup.py, BUILD, etc, and discover for itself what the dependencies are.

Your "distribution" of ROS is formed by listing all the packages and repos in this big file, for which there is other tooling to manage pulling dependency sources, whatever: https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/foxy/distributi...

Anyway, so the existing ROS/nix efforts (1) seem to basically consume all of this package/distribution metadata at once and generate a giant parallel structure of nix definitions (eg https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay/blob/master/di...), which I fear would be completely opaque to users and any system which required everyone to leave behind these existing workflows would be an immediate non-starter.

I think the ideal scenario (and what it would look like if I built this myself based on debs) would be that you could source the "base" workspace as usual (enter the nix-shell?), and check out source, build packages as usual with colcon, the usual workspace-building tool, but there'd be an extra plugin/verb/flag for it, which would make it build each package as a nix package instead of into the usual installspace. The verb would generate the nix definitions on the fly, and probably handle the invocation and build-parallelism side of it as well.

[1]: https://github.com/acowley/ros2nix, https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay

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...