Dotfield

My worlds and systems, a nutrient-rich typo terraforming the hungry heads of a talking planet.

Disclaimer

These configurations are generally very rough, disorganised, and frustrating to work with. I plan to do some clean up soon.

If you have questions or feedback, please ask/post away! I hope visitors manage to find something helpful/inspiring/interesting, but please keep in mind that I have no idea what I'm doing. I sometimes make changes that I sound confident about, but may end up reversing them days or hours later. If something doesn't work for you, I may be able to help, but please don't assume that just because it lives in my configuration means that it "works" or "is a best practice" or "is in any way secure".

Which brings me to the license:

License

Copyright (C) 2020-2022 Chris Montgomery

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You may read the license in full within the COPYING file included in the project root. You may also find it at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/

Structure

Profiles/Suites

Overall, I've found that the profile "composition" approach is very difficult to scale. I plan on moving back towards a simpler module-toggle structure, converting "suites" into "profiles". From my understanding, that's what profiles always have been in NixOS terminology. I believe "suites" is an unncessary and unwieldly abstraction and hope to see it removed from the DevOS example eventually, or at least "downgraded" to just another example. But only after finding a better suggestion.

Systems

ryosuke Computer-1

This one is fresh off the workbench. After much frustration and screaming during assembly, I've built a small form-factor PC in a Teenage Engineering Computer-1 case.

Details to follow.

I intend for this to be my primary and semi-portable personal computer and perhaps transitioning boschic to a new Face as home server.

boschic

A three-faced beast lurking in the shadows of my living room.

Originally built in 2015, recently revamped for ~computing power~ ~playing Myst in VR~ ~Elden Ring~ fun.

Face One: Gaming + VR

I don't want to open a gateway to my own VR Hell on NixOS, so this Face should only be summoned after invoking the Ten Windows.

Face Two: Home Theater PC

Boschic is connected to a ViewSonic "4K" projector pointed at a ceiling-mounted 100in. screen.

While the Plex Media Player experience on NixOS is... manageable... I suspect that the situation may be deteriorating:

Plex has stated they will be dropping support for the "Plex Media Player" application. And it shows. This would be fine with me, because its UI is terrible, especially in 4K resolution across the room. Its UI animations are janky and jittery as hell. And yet... it plays even 4K video perfectly.

The ~new~ resurrected Plex HTPC application is beautiful. The design is well-thought-out for my own sort of use case. However, it requires Flatpak (yuck), and it totally fails to play back even low-resolution videos on my projector without introducing unwatchable stuttering. I've noticed some log errors relating to WebGL. It seems to be related to Wayland/XWayland. I thought that the proprietary NVIDIA drivers fixed the issue, but then it came back. It's completely unusable with Nouveau.

So, uh, I don't know.

My roommates usually invoke the Ten Windows before playing video anyway. I'm sure this says something about how I have not done a great job making the NixOS-GNOME HTPC experience easily approachable on a guest user account (that's zortflower!), but I've ran into so many issues trying to get it working on my own account that I totally understand.

Face Three: Daily Driver

Currently my primary computer, which has caused some conflict and pain (I literally sit on the couch all day). This shouldn't be the case for much longer though.

HodgePodge aka the "Sacred Chao"

An early-2014 15-inch MacBook Pro who has seen quite the life. Mostly unused for the past several years due to the availability of more portable work laptops. It is now living out its life in a declarative retirement home.

Its excessive clunkiness is excacerbated by the sharp edges exposed on its sturdy sticker-laden plastic case over the years. The situation is more manageable now thanks to the globs of Sugru preventing any further bodily harm.

Incubation

"tsone" (working title)

Hetzner SX134.

For backups, remote builds, mass storage, pretty much everything that needs to be accessible remotely.

Planned

• ArchiveBox
• BorgBackup archive storage from other hosts
• Some sort of fast "cloud" storage for everyday use (notes and document sync, recent photos, etc.)

sommoch [damaged+misplaced]

Dead but dreaming.

Laid to indefinite rest when one of the cats, seeking human attention, chewed through the LCD screen. We did not speak for a week.

Still works, but unusable without external display.

Suffers from congenital Butterfly Keyboard Syndrome. Runs macOS.

Currently lost somewhere in the meat ether.

Identities

From https://github.com/drduh/YubiKey-Guide#using-keys:

export KEYID="0x135EEDD0F71934F3"
gpg --recv $KEYID

Vertebrae

• https://github.com/divnix/digga :: a good friend

Grafts

Generally in order of recency.

• https://github.com/Xe/nixos-configs
• https://github.com/sei40kr/dotfiles
• https://github.com/malob/nixpkgs
• https://github.com/kclejeune/system
• https://github.com/ahmedelgabri/dotfiles
• https://github.com/cmacrae/config
• https://github.com/hlissner/dotfiles
• https://github.com/d12frosted/environment
• https://github.com/hardselius/dotfiles
• https://github.com/alrra/dotfiles
• https://github.com/jasonheecs/ubuntu-server-setup

Errata

kitty terminal custom icons

kitty's FAQ page shows a small collection of high-quality alternative icons designed by some kitty fans.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/faq/#i-do-not-like-the-kitty-icon

While I personally don't dislike the kitty icon, these alternatives are great.

• Currently: https://github.com/DinkDonk/kitty-icon
• https://github.com/k0nserv/kitty-icon
• https://github.com/hristost/kitty-alternative-icon

NixOS

TKTKTK

macOS

There's a couple hoops to jump through in order to specify a custom application icon.

And, unfortunately, because I currently install kitty.app with Homebrew due to frequent build failures with nixpkgs#kitty, any customisations will be reverted whenever the app updates.

I've added a script called kitty-set-app-icon to re-copy the desired icon back to kitty.app post-update. This script is available via the kitty-helpers.setAppIcon package.

Credit goes to this blog post for outlining a simple alternative to the usual drag-and-drop approach.