What is something you want to use, yet are NOT using?

https://lemmy.ml/post/18434192

What is something you want to use, yet are NOT using? - Lemmy

For me, I really want to get into niri [https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri], but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet). Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.

Common Lisp. It would take a long while before I’m comfortable working on a project using that language.
That’s my first time hearing of Lem—it looks fantastic. What’s the issue with it on NixOS?
  • There is no lem package on NixOS.
  • Common lisp related packages tend to be outdated
  • NixOS violates FHS to allow each packages to build against specific versions of dependencies, so CL tools might not work as expected.

Anything beyond setting up a network-wide dns blocker on docker, so… crowdsec, fail2ban, some proxy-related stuff, zero trust tunnelers and so on.

Why? Because its overkill to my current setup and I don’t see myself using em for real other than for learning purposes, and thats it.

And before someone asks “Do you protect your server at all?”. Other than making some “hacky” stuff with my internet so all ports appear as closed whilst they actually aren’t? Eh, not really. Still, my server is about to reach a year of running nonstop 24/7 and it has never been hacked a single time since then, so naaaw.

How do you tell whether it’s been hacked? The hallmark of a good hack is invisibility, like modifying logs. Do you perhaps count SSH sessions in your router and verify it against client logs, or somesuch technique?
Bcachefs, and bcachefs on root. Need something with filesystem level encryption instead of LUKS, and *ubuntu’s and derivatives have all abandoned ZFS on root installs now.
What’s your use case for FS-level encryption? LUKS has worked for me so far, I wonder where I’m missing out.
Bcachefs has filesystem encryption without LUKS? Did this have an audit? I use BTRFS and it is fine, but boot is unencrypted (using TPM would be cool)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcachefs

Bcachefs is a copy-on-write (COW) file system for Linux-based operating systems.[3] Features include caching,[4] full file-system encryption using the ChaCha20 and Poly1305 algorithms,[5] native compression[4] via LZ4, gzip[6] and Zstandard,[7] snapshots,[4] CRC-32C and 64-bit checksumming.[3] It can span block devices, including in RAID configurations.[5]

I see it has an audit back in 2017, but I’ve yet to find anything newer. The finding was good, but suggested further audit be done.

Bcachefs - Wikipedia

I dont see the difference to BTRFS apart from encryption and maybe caching? I was always confused why people hype it so much.

Interesting, yes I wouldnt not use LUKS if the alternative is less known, not used by enterprise distros

The tiered storage stuff is pretty cool. You can say "I want this data on this disk, so if I get a cache miss from a faster disk/RAM it'll come from this other disk first."

I believe it also has some interesting ways of handling redundancy like erasure coding, and I thiiiink it does some kind of byte-level deduplication? I don't know if that's implemented or is even still planned, but I remember being quite excited for it. It was supposed to be dedupe without all of the hideous drawbacks that things like ZFS dedupe have.

EDIT: deduplication is absolutely not a thing yet. I don't know if it's still on the roadmap.

It’s mainly supposed to be simpler and by extension faster than btrfs (which is kinda proven by the fact that fewer devs made this thing work in less time when compared to btrfs). It happens to enable some extra features that way too.

However, while btrfs annecdotally had many issues, it’s used by big players like SUSE and even bigger ones like Facebook these days. bcachefs on the other hand is nowhere near as battle tested, so I’ll stay away from it for a little longer.

Does it have the self-healing capabilies of btrfs scrup and btrfs defragment? I guess btrfs balance is b-tree specific.

I heard BTRFS is bettter than EXT4 because it can do these things, EXT4 cant

Bachefs is in the kernel now so trying it on a spare drive or partition is super trivial these days depending on distro. You only need a few minutes of time.

Getting it on root is a bit harder as almost no installers support it yet. The only distro I can think of is CachyOS.

It’s far more ready than Wayland, get it into these distro’s installers! Are you listening, distros?
NixOS
Nix flakes, me.
I just started yesterday in a VM. It’s no stress and you can easily put your configuration on metal after. Pretty fun stuff.
I have my garuda installation just where and how i want it to be. NixOS just always seemed very interesting, but i don’t want to run it on my daily machine.
Don’t, you can still install nix into Garuda. Works great as a separate package manager that won’t get in the way.
The most satisfying part of the NixOS process is deploying to bare metal and watching it work exactly as you intend it to
Agreed, but I found getting NixOS the way I want it, to be super overwhelming, and documentation simply sucks. I’ve been thinking of forking ZaneyOS (Link: gitlab.com/Zaney/zaneyos) and basing my NixOS config on it. Otherwise, it’s just too much.
Tyler Kelley / ZaneyOS 🟰 Best ❄️ NixOS Configs · GitLab

My main NixOS configuration. Features include a polished Hyprland environment. A fully configured NeoVIM environment, QMK support. A Keyboard shortcut menu pop-down available in the top bar and...

GitLab
I tried it a while back, thought it would be good for my servers, but at the end of the day I found that it was a lot of learning for a very small benefit that could be achieved differently. Instead I focused on learning Ansible which also allowed me to write configs to deploy lots of services to my servers. I still want to learn Nix at some point, but I feel it’s a lot less important if you have an Ansible playbook that does the same thing and even more for any distro you might care to install.
I think the problem is that most people dive right in and go to NixOS which has its quirks as a linux OS (see FHS). The Nix language is great at building and moving source code between computers, really any big cillection if binaries. If you don’t do that, try just using the nix-shell command to instantly run a piece of software without installing it. You can write a shell.nix file to hop into and out of an environment with whatever software you need. Once you can write a couple .nix files then move onto NixOS; which after all is just a big collection of binaries.

My drive to nix was so I could simply manage what packages I had installed with a text file. If I removed something from the file, I expect it to be uninstalled. I never found a tool/wrapper for apt to do this.

If you want to start with nixos, I would take whatever distro you are on and install nix and then home manager. Then, you can slowly migrate your user configuration over without starting from scratch. That worked really well for me going from ubuntu to nixos.

Zed - I’ve been kind of using it for one-off edits, but it’s just not mature yet for most languages.
GitHub - zed-industries/zed: Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.

Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter. - zed-industries/zed

GitHub
And they use extremely bad coding practices
Have a source?

Somewhere on Lemmy but dont bother to look as it has no search.

There also is a Github issue. Search for “zed automatic download plugins”

@[email protected]

I want to use COSMIC but its design sucks, I prefer KDE (and on the Rust side: slint).

I want to use GNOME as what it does works great, but it lacks a whole list of features I use.

I want to use Haruna or many other KDE apps, but GNOME/GTK apps are often better and I dont care.

I want to use Gapless as it is the only music player on Linux that seems to not suck? But it lacks many features.

I want to use GNOME as what it does works great, but it lacks a whole list of features I use.

Watch the list actually get longer over time.

discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/…/127071

Including a bit of ranting

How I customize Fedora Silverblue

I am a Fedora Kinoite user, and this will likely not change for now. KDE is messy, but I love it’s features. Features dont mean customizability though. I found this survey really interesting. Customizability is a big “selling point”, but many people simply prefer the general defaults and look. There are still [things I miss, where it blows my ming that GNOME doesnt have these by default: Editing screenshots Having a clipboard history A traditional single panel (that is at the bottom so yo...

Fedora Discussion
Does COSMIC’s design suck or is it in pre-alpha?
No that is the design they want. If something is ready, then their design.

Its design sucks

Agreed. But I’m SO tired of trying to find and configure a good tiling WM that has rounded corners and isn’t impossible to install or created by assholes (it also helps that nice QoL features like easy kb layout switching are included ootb).

Qtile, when scenefx support happens (which will happen when scenefx releases v1.0 aka anytime between this year and the next decade by the looks of things), will be perfect for me but until then, I’m torn between Qtile, Hyprland and COSMIC.

As far as rounded corners and easy to use, I’ve had a tremendous time with swayfx for the past few months, which I switched to from Hyprland.
GitHub - WillPower3309/swayfx: SwayFX: Sway, but with eye candy!

SwayFX: Sway, but with eye candy! Contribute to WillPower3309/swayfx development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
If only it supported dynamic tiling… (and no, autotiling doesn’t cut it; Actually, I need to look into persway again and see if that can work)
I want to use Neovim but I haven’t gotten around to really learning it yet.

NeoVim is almost a drop-in replacement for Vim (the configuration file is under .config). Plugin installation might be different, tho.

Find a migration guide and be brave.

I used neovim but recently switched to helix and highly recommend it. If you haven’t tried nvim yet, give helix a try before deciding. A good way to compare is do the tutorial of each and see which you like more nvim +Tutor and hx --tutor (orhelix --tutor).

If you’re a current vim user the helix keybindings are only a small learning curve after the tutorial, and feel a lot smoother imo

I love Helix. I like that it pretty much works out of the box and the only thing you have to do is install language servers and in some cases configure them, but that’s (mostly) well documented. No need to install plugins or use a preset “distribution” like with NeoVim. I also like the built-in keyboard shortcut hints, for example when you press g (goto) it shows you what key will do what.

The way Helix does “select first, then act” is subjective, but I like it.

Agree on all counts. I didn’t like finding and comparing plugins for neovim, and then wrestling with environment stuff to get them to work, and having to change a bunch of options to work how I like. With helix, my config of things I’ve changed from default is very small, and there’s no wrestling with plugins.

And yeah, “select then act” feels a lot smoother and more intuitive to me. If you like that and like plugins, check out kakuone

This is the reason I liked kakoune right away after I started using it: select, then act, and every movement is also a selection.
Could you elaborate on what helix is?
A keyboard and terminal based text editor, similar in some ways to neovim, vim, and vi
I’ve used helix for a few months and liked a few default keybindings. Didn’t like the reversed sequences (movement then action) so switched back to neovim and configured helix like bindings for some actions.

I tried out Helix, but I think the biggest issue that I have is that with (neo)vim, I can use the keybindings in most of the editors I use through a plugin (such as IdeaVim for the JetBrains suite) - but I do not think the concept of Helix keybinding plugins have really hit anywhere.

Helix itself seemed really cool when I was playing around with the tutor mode though.

Yeah I only really use it for personal stuff for that reason. There’s a vscode plugin, but last time I tried it it was really slow
The learning curve is absolutely colossal, especially if you want to use it as a full IDE. Even with the legend panel it still doesn’t tell you have the story
That’s me as well, I’ve used vim for simple edits over the years but more and more just used nano for most of my terminal based edits. Finally ran vimtutor (mainly because I wasn’t aware of it) and wow, I should have done that years ago.
I kind of want to try wayland just to be modern, but I’m pretty happy with xmonad and don’t want to learn another window manager.
I migrated from XMonad to Sway, it checks all my requirements. I don’t miss the Turing-complete configurability.

You might want to look into River, a tiling Wayland compositor inspired by xmonad. Disclaimer, I’ve not actually used xmonad before so I’m not in a position to compare the two. But River is configured entirely through riverctl commands. Its “config” is an executable, by default at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/river/init but you can point it to a different path, which can technically be any executable file that just executes when River starts. Ordinarily it’d be a shell script calling all the riverctl commands you want to get your River set up the way you like it, but it could be any executable you like really. You can also use other languages other than shell scripting.

It’s still in pretty early development, but I daily drive it for my main general-purpose machine and it works completely fine. I use it for web browsing, coding, gaming, chatting, general productivity, etc, all works. I’ve noticed some minor hiccups but nothing breaking or unusable. Tbh I would say it’s more stable than Hyprland which I’ve also used and have noticed that Hyprland updates (especially from git) would frequently break it, whereas I was running River compiled from the latest commit of master branch for a while and never had an update break things.

river

A non-monolithic Wayland compositor

Codeberg.org
Ceph. I have some Raspberry Pi’s that I’m going to set up a cluster with. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I half expect the performance to be relatively terrible, but maybe it won’t and I can try to build something on top of the cluster in a sort of hyper converged setup.

Niri looks really cool. I’ve used tiling WM before but scrolling is a unique take, perhaps more productive for some folks?

Nushell is a good one. I do data science for a living and it’d be nice to have the shell handle some small data transformations instead of writing a script in python. But all the syntax and behavior is very different than bash, so I’ve been afraid to start because of the learning curve.

docker I guess, I still don’t know how it works, create them, etc
You don’t have to know how it works in order to use it. I don’t know either but I could host services using docker. trust me it’s way easier than it seems.
Same here. Even easier if you use an app to manage it for you like dockge, portainer, Cosmos, etc.
You don’t have to… if the project you want to use has a good setup process. Otherwise you’ll be scouring Docker docs, GitHub issues, and StackOverflow for years.