I added specializations over a year ago when I was still new to NixOS
and trying out some of the many different features unique to it. These
days I don't need much more than a terminal and a web browser, and I
haven't used GNOME or Plasma in over a year at this point.
Nowadays everything I need from a computer I can accomplish with the
terminal. Nixpkgs trained me to dig deep into source code to figure out
how to do things, and using a PinePhone significantly improved my
awareness of how Linux interacts with hardware and how to configure it.
One of the biggest motivators for dropping these environments is that I
can't keep up with the changes that are made to GNOME and Plasma.
Hyprland has served my needs well and feels more stable since there
isn't a user interface that's constantly changing.
Note that glib was supposedly added for mounting-related things, but
this should be possible to upstream into the derivation instead if it
hasn't been added already.
After having to use vagrant again after a while I've decided that it's
better to simply "do things the right way" the first time with the
declarative nature of Nix instead of trying to make install scripts
work.
Notably, the feedback loop between provisioning Vagrant boxes was
lacking compared to rebuilding on NixOS, and the virtual machine
frequently had to be destroyed and provisioned all over again, versus
having already built derivations with Nix.
Sometimes you really need to use a stable and reliable Xorg desktop
system. GNOME crashes when switching workspaces with osu! open, and
Plasma seems like too much for just wanting to run osu! without
having to worry about all the Wayland shenanigans decreasing fps.
I used bspwm for years however development has slowed down recently.
I've always liked dwm from trying it previously, and it is comforting
knowing that your window manager is minimal and will always work the
same way.
- kanjidraw: Online alternatives with radicals etc. are better
- dmenu-wayland: Breaks with multiple monitors
- obs: Easier to use wf-recorder
- wallust: Easier to use stylix
Fixes an issue where previously the background color would be incorrect
when the color scheme was changed, which was particularly noticeable on
Phosh where the background would display when toggling the on-screen
keyboard.
Note that the logo has been intentionally left out this time to simplify
things a bit.
This was an interesting experiment however it wasn't very practical
since text became difficult to read and the wider width of the font
broke a lot of programs on the small PinePhone screen.
Will be trying this again since Hyprland offers a substantial
performance improvement over Phosh and hardware accelerated videos
are broken anyway with the lower cpu speed.
This was my attempt at using GNOME Mobile. It works inside the x86_64
virtual machine but fails when reaching "Started Display Manager" on the
actual device.
Unfortunately there are too many bugs for Hyprland on the PinePhone such
as hardware accelerated videos appearing red and convergence in general
being much slower than the phosh counterpart.
Most of these applications are poorly designed for mobile,
don't start up at all, or aren't relevant for my use case.
Note that the correct `portfolio` application was actually
`portfolio-filemanager` in nixpkgs, and I removed it due to
the lack of thumbnailing support.
A lot of these applications are cute but I'd never end up using them,
such as a regular expression GUI and other novelties that web
applications accomplish in a more advanced manner.
