Thank you for what you're doing

1

Hello,

I’ve been using NixOS as my dekstop distro for almost 1.5 years now. I started out with 0 understanding and experience of both Nix and NixOS. I’m a professional programmer and a short lead time to have a new laptop up and running - in the case of hardware failure or otherwise - is extremely compelling to me, so I guess my motivation to use NixOS outweighed the steep learning curve and I stuck with it.

The system I’m running is bleeding edge - NixOS unstable, home-manager master and latest kernel. In these 17 months, the times at which an update caused noticeable problems were exceedingly rare - in fact, it’s mostly been some application not playing great with Wayland (still looking at you, Slack.)

I find this degree of stability amazing, given the insane rate of daily changes in nixpkgs, and the fact that most maintainers do this in their free time and without corporate or other sponsorship. I just wanted to stop by and say thanks for what you’re doing. NixOS is commercial-grade software and I can’t imagine going back.

18 Likes
2

Electron apps suck for many reasons, this is the main one I stopped using them. You can just visit the website in a real browser that isn’t a million CVEs behind and actually built correctly for wayland support.

I built this module to let me use firefox to open these types of websites in an electron-like window: dotfiles/home-modules/firefox-webapp.nix at ef1a08cf30ab648f799c7369847fe935df7e7a93 · TLATER/dotfiles · GitHub

The main downside is that keybindings won’t work if that browser isn’t in focus, but it’s pretty easy to make your WM capture and send key inputs to that window if you e.g. need a mute button (or just script pipewire to mute the channel…).

5 Likes
3

Yeah that’s how I roll with slack and teams. It’s super good enough.

2 Likes