Many of them don’t even allow it to be a hidden file—they just require a fully unhidden “tool.yml” file sitting right there in the root of your project.

I love this. I hate when tools only allow hidden config files. I want to know where the config is—my teammates should be aware of where the config is. I don’t want to be tricked into thinking there isn’t a config file in a directory.

I actually have alias ls='ls -A' in my bashrc so I see everything.

I’ve been enjoying Guix for the last 8 days. You declare your OS and home config in a file and you can check them into source control. It was originally a fork of NixOS, but has diverged a lot.

The CLIs and APIs are pretty nice. They have a concept of “channels”, which are git repos you can download software from. The default official channel only hosts FOSS software, but you can trivially add non-FOSS channels and they work just as well as the first-party channels.

Each channel update and package install, removal, update get put on a log, which you can trivially jump between. guix package --switch-genereation=28 and boom you’re at that generation (it’s like a git commit). The software and config changes get saved in the generation so the jump is clean and atomic. I actually bisected my OS yesterday to track a bug! That was cool. You can also create and share isolated, reproducible environments.

Guix works with Flatpak and distrobox as well, in case some software isn’t available in existing channels. I got HiDPI, Zoom, Logseq, Syncthing, and Tailscale working.

The biggest drawback for me so far is that it doesn’t use systemd. Not sure if it’s a dealbreaker for me yet. Systemd does way more than just manage system services, so GNU Shepherd (which Guix uses) isn’t a real replacement.

‘MechaHitler’ incident

Government: Shut up and take my money!

I use Emacs on the daily, and I just can’t get into Scheme.

Do you find that Elisp and Scheme are too different? I don’t know either, so they look almost the same to me.

other contributors will not even note you are using it.

Ooooh, that’s interesting.

I didn’t do it!

A privacy-focused operating system may seem more trouble than it’s worth. But when I replaced Google’s Pixel OS with GrapheneOS, I found it to be a transformative experience. For one, the installation was painless, and I didn’t lose any modern software features. Installing aftermarket operating systems used to equal a compromised smartphone experience, but I didn’t find that to be true in the case of GrapheneOS.

Case in point: even though GrapheneOS doesn’t include any Google services, I was surprised to find that you can install the Play Store with relative ease and almost all apps work flawlessly — even most banking ones.

Oh, nice. This sounds promising! I’m adding it to my list: [guix, emacs, graphene]

share with him guix manifest

Aaaah: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Writing-Manifests.html

# Write a manifest for the packages specified on the command line.
guix shell --export-manifest gcc-toolchain make git > manifest.scm

Heck yeah!

Uh, sorry. I don’t follow. Is there a way to tell all programs to write to one file in Guix?

I’m in Guix Linux land right now and I miss journald. I’m supposed to wade through all the log files in /var/log myself??

So while I almost exclusively use the command line, I do it all from within the Emacs GUI.

That’s good to hear. Normally, I have a bunch of file and terminal buffers open in Vim and work across all of them—and stay in Vim the whole time. (Well, unless I need something like a browser.)

Sounds like this is definitely possible in Emacs. Good! I was scared for a moment because I thought I would have to… gasps alt-tab between Emacs and my terminal.

Btw, here’s how you configure HiDPI for GNOME. Unfortunately, my laptop has a hydeepeeay display, so it’s not fully compatible with Linux. (It’s 3840x2160, so at least 2x scaling is possible, hypothetically.)

Commands from the Arch Wiki, but also adds cursor scaling:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings overrides "[{'Gdk/WindowScalingFactor', <2>}, {'Gtk/CursorThemeSize', <48>}]"
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 2

The default GNOME configuration is some how missing that. I didn’t have to do that in Arch, but I do in Guix. IDK. Anyway, if you don’t run those commands certain apps will be tiny, including a tiny mouse cursor.

Oooooh, ok. Thanks for breaking that down.

What about Emacs GUI vs Emacs TUI? Do people run Emacs as a terminal app? Or is the typical way of running Emacs as a GUI app? How’s the shell integration with the GUI app? Normally, I like staying in the terminal.

Ooooh, nice. I just watched the first several videos. Way more focused, great thanks!

Btw, here’s how you install distrobox on Guix.

First, install rootless Podman: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Miscellaneous-Services.html#Rootless-Podman-Service.

You need to edit your /etc/config.scm or where ever you store your system config. Import the right modules/services, add your user to cgroup, add iptables-service-type to your services, add rootless-podman-service-type and configure it.

(use-service-modules containers networking …)
(use-modules (gnu system accounts))  ;for 'subid-range'

(operating-system
  ;; …
  (users (cons (user-account
                (name "alice")
                (comment "Bob's sister")
                (group "users")

                ;; Adding the account to the "cgroup" group
                ;; makes it possible to run podman commands.
                (supplementary-groups '("cgroup" "wheel"
                                        "audio" "video")))
               %base-user-accounts))
  (services
    (append (list (service iptables-service-type)
                  (service rootless-podman-service-type
                           (rootless-podman-configuration
                             (subgids
                               (list (subid-range (name "alice"))))
                             (subuids
                               (list (subid-range (name "alice")))))))
            %base-services)))

Then of course you run guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm.

Now you can do a simple guix install distrobox. If you install distrobox first, you don’t end up using rootless podman and you run into more problems that way. (You have to use distrobox --root.)

After that command, everything should work like normal. Enjoy. 🍻

distrobox create --image docker.io/library/archlinux:latest --name arch-dev
distrobox enter arch-dev

Btw, here’s the guix home configuration file I used to add the contents of flatpak.sh into my ~/.profile, in order to update the XDG_DATA_HOME env var.

(use-modules (gnu home)
             (gnu home services shells)
             (guix gexp)
             (gnu services))

(home-environment
  (services
    (list
      (simple-service 'flatpak-service
                      home-shell-profile-service-type
                      (list (local-file
                              (string-append (getenv "HOME") "/.guix-profile/etc/profile.d/flatpak.sh")
                              "flatpak.sh"))))))

guix shell and guix shell container for dev environment isolation

Yeah! This is one of the features I’m most interested in. I haven’t gotten to using this feature yet, but I was curious about it.

Let’s say I’m working on a project that requires Go, Node, maybe some C library, and GNU Make. Seems like I would be able to use guix shell for this, right? Great.

Now if a friend wanted to work on the project, could I share my guix shell configuration with him? (Assuming he’s also a Guix user.)

I’m currently using distrobox.ini plus distrobox assemble for this kind of workflow, but of course this isn’t totally reproducible.

When other countries start invading?

Is there a federated Discourse? https://www.discourse.org/

I’d like to see that.

Because it’s awesome. Join us… join us… join us…