I finally bit the bullet and set up nixos on my desktop (hostname Victim). With that, there’s (almost) nothing stopping me from working on some more serious projects.

Aside from that, I don’t really remember what I have been doing since last devlog, because I went on small Distrohoping arc and worked on some other projects, in other YSWSes.

Discovery of the devlog: Fedora Rawhide. I never liked fedora, because of how slow it updates, but rawhide fixes that. Still, in my opinion it is last gen distribution, with manual updates and imperative system management, so I can’t recommend it.

Happy Hacking!

I meant to write this devlog much sooner. I created proper modules for desktop environment. I did that in last monday, it took around 2 hours. After that I realized that there’re several issues that needs fixing.

I had to take an almost week long break because of reasons and after it, I worked on some other project.

Now, when I could I fixed those, bugs, but that quickly snowballed to adding new features, troubleshooting newly introduced bugs and even contributing an upstream fix to one of the programs I use (which still haven’t been merged :().

I’m trying to treat those devlogs more like blogs. Let me know if you like that.

Discovery of the devlog: Startpage. Startpage is a search engine with focus on openness, just like DDG, which I used before. I find the results in it much better than DDG, mainly because it uses Google as upstream search provider instead of Bing.

Happy Hacking!

I fixed a few minor bugs and did one big change: Introduced images for other GPU vendors.

It wasn’t that hard of a task, since most of the infrastructure were already in place. The hard part was figuring out how am I going to do that and troubleshooting.

I also added a few utilities to the image, most notably Greenlight and goverlay.

There’s not that much to write about. This project is a pretty boring one.

If OCI layering didn’t work as it does, I would be using almost a terabyte of github storage to store those images (3gb per images6 images45 days image retention).

The project is officially ready to be shipped (or so I hope, the reviewers are scary /s).

Nushell is working!

Obviously it’s not all I’ve been doing this 4 hours. You know the story: You write down a few things you want to improve, but while implementing one thing you notice three more that need a fix and later after 4 hours you don’t even remember what you have been working on.

Maybe it’s just me, this project is also something very special for me, as it’s declaration of my working machine, for at least next few years, if not lifetime.

If you’re reading this devlog on stardance frontpage, let me know if you like this format of dividing a devlog on a few hardly related parts, some of which are completely detached from the actual project. Saying it out-loud makes it look not like good idea.

In my search for objectively™ best shell I tried all the mainstream ones, but in my opinion nothing (Ehem, elvish, ehem) comes close to nushell. It has almost all the features of fish and other modern shells, while adding unique and better way of interacting with data.

I feel like I’m slowly finishing this project, there’s not much to do. Obviously this is one of those things that are always in development, because it is well, my personal system. Each time I want to add a package, I need to interact with my configuration and it’s a good thing.

Happy Hacking!

I FINALLY GOT RID OF SPECIAL ARGS!

Okay here’s why that change is important (I need to wait for CI to pass, so I have around 30 minutes of “free time”): Special args are variables that can be passed to modules. You have to explicitly “send” and explicitly “receive” them, which makes them kinda bad. They’re also non modular, meaning they can break without sender.

I finally bit the bullet and moved to module based system. The advantages of them are as follows:

• No explicit receiving required
• Easier to create complicated expressions with
• Can be limited to a few values only
• Values can be something other than strings
• Officially supported by flake-parts, the framework I’m using
• More portable

Generally they’re a superior options and I’m happy I implemented them.

There’re still many things I want to work on:

• Plasma and Niri desktops with modules for DE configuration
• Nushell with modules for shell configuration
• Improving docs
• More hosts
• Other projects :)

I forgot something for sure, but I’m honestly surprised that I could recall only so few things. Anyway, happy hacking!

The project is ready for a ship!

I created a README, compliant with stardance instructions

Merged! My second PR got merged into the upstream. I’m really proud of what I did, even if the change took only 19 minutes to code and test.

The change wasn’t that hard to make, thanks to the fact the main contributor allowed for coping generated files instead of linking them.

My PR has been closed, because the main contributor created a better solution for the issue I was trying to fix.

Does that sucks? Maybe, but it’s better for the project to have their, better and more mature solution, over mine.

A link to the PR for the curious: https://github.com/cachix/devenv/pull/2932

I did a lot of minor things, such as making sure CI passes, fixing the modpack and swapping few mods here and there.

I don’t expect to change many things from now, the modpack is finished.

Not always you have something big to talk about in a devlog

This is yet again devlog full of minor, non interesting changes.

I have been mainly troubleshooting my server (which btw is still not finished. which is wild), but I did many other things along that.

Now I’m trying to move back to Plasma and implement proper module system. I expect that to be quite time consuming task, but… nothing. It’s just going to be time consuming.

Another idea is changing the shell to nushell, so that’s second on the agenda.

From the things unrelated to project itself, I changed my IDE from vscode to zed.

I have lots of other projects in mind, so I will work on this in meantime.

I don’t even have anything to show, so I will just add a screenshot of my editor. Dotfiles aren’t sexy.

A massive, misc fixes PR shipped! It fixed a lot of small pain points and improved some existing features.

The whole list of changed things is available on the screenshot.

There’s so much to do now that I don’t know if I want to pause for a moment and work on other project.

I added my modpack to the image! Now Prism Launcher comes preinstalled with instance using that modpack.

I couldn’t be able to create expose scripts for lutris and heroic, mainly because I was too lazy to do that and I couldn’t find a place where those launchers would reliably put icons for the games.

With that, I consider the project complete. I’m looking forward to integrating it with my system and I don’t expect groundbreaking changes any time soon

I troubleshot some things, made few changes on the mod list and switched from Dependabot to Renovate. I finally got the game to work, which is a success considering what was happening before. More in the ship message.

The modpack is done and waiting for acceptation from modrinth stuff. I only need to create a workflow for automatic pushing to modrinth and I’m set.

It was a pretty enjoyable experience. Packwiz makes it easy to maintain and create a modpack, I basically had to create a little bit of infrastructure and push to modrinth.

I finally did something original!

I added a script that exposes games from the container to the host. I only got steam games working for now, but I plan to implement lutris, heroic and prism if that’s possible.

I basically finished the project, with only 4 hours on clock. Good time, considering I have no prior experience with Containerfiles, but I didn’t really had to do much work.

I basically re implemented steambox from the Ublue ecosystem, with few small tweaks.

I’m generally happy with how it turned, but I would like to have more personal things to it.

Despite almost being finished, there’re still many things I want to do, so I don’t expect to ship soon, at least not until Saturday.