This week in squirrels…

Summary

  • Donate to your favorite causes! Donating, even in small amounts, can truly make a difference.
    • I have specific projects I support:
      • MusicBrainz
      • Signal
      • HomeAssistant
      • OBS
    • Next year, I am probably also going to be looking at Niri and Lix as areas to focus on and help.
  • NixOS, once the Shine has worn off
    • I feel like I have overcome most of the biggest blockers and issues that I hear most people hitting, but now I am starting to really brush into some of the “subtler” issues, or maybe the next level ones. A lot of these are specifically about NixPkgs’ pain points around size and community.
    • This is enough to be its own blog post, but I’d rather only write posts about how to fix things. Callouts and complaining can stick in my daily notes.
    • Annoyance, the first: While NixOS claims to have the biggest package repo, it falters in having the “least likely to have the latest package” available. It would be fine if this were some reasonable expected pin, but no, a LOT of packages are just not well-maintained.
    • Annoyance, the second: I opened a PR for a package that supports Darwin and waited over four days for CI. Which is probably one of the reasons package maintenance is so spotty.
    • Annoyance, the third: This is likely tied right back with the last one, but one failed build in the pipeline for NixOS stops all patches from coming through till it is addressed. So something can be merged but not released for days in my experience, even things like security patches for browsers. When I wrote this, nixpkgs/nixos-25.11 was 5 days behind, and nixpkgs-unstable just jumped from 5 days behind to 2 days behind…. I don’t think the reasons and the risks this can cause are well discussed or understood, especially when many people are running edge packages of high-surface-area apps like their browsers.
    • Annoyance, the fourth: Self-packaging or overlaying apps can suck long-term. One of the things I need to master next is having a dedicated cache somewhere for all of my own packages, because the huge CPU is constantly rebuilding things or reading some app I added to the store manually because licensing is obnoxious.
    • Annoyance, the fifth: Suddenly installing more duplicates of everything! Why? Because your build should be 4gb bigger. But no, seriously, WHY? Sometimes I do a basic flake update, and it’s -a thing- for no obvious reason. Now, on a general level, I understand that a build dependency had a patch that changed the build signature enough to change the sha of TONNES of other downstream packages. I remember seeing this spiral out with Chef’s habitat. We were all reminded why dynamic linking is so popular. But at least with habitat, it was easy to point at what was causing it and understand the chain. Nix isn’t communicating this well with the tools it puts in front of the users. It also doesn’t wholly make sense why one diversion needs three to six versions of a downstream package. This means I have SIX hash-only different versions in use?! really.
    • Annoyance, not about packages: I am a long-time Linux user, and I got good at Linux by examining and reading everything, with curiosity about what all the files are, how they are set up, and how they change. NixOS abstracts the configuration state away to the point where, when I make an update, I can see there IS a configuration change to apply, but I cannot easily see it. I can make a change to Nix, compile it, and see the sha and date of the generation I created, but I cannot diff the states at all. I have built tools that start to do this, but they are super noisy, and it’s hard to parse what I am changing, which has risks when I am monitoring changes to my systems.
  • Niri, the shine hasn’t worn off
    • I wrote about “a month into Niri” and thought I would check in again
    • Honestly. The latest 25.11 release of Niri fixes the vast majority of complaints I could summon.
    • My biggest problem is still that some multi-display window shortcuts tend to be something I flail at remembering. But this feels more like an ME problem, and I could fix this by cutting down the “help” screen to just the things I forget and using it more
    • Scrolling is much more effective than tiling for my workflow, especially while streaming and working.
    • And a separately controlled workspace per screen is heavenly
  • POSSE, and the next phase of my site
  • Physical health
    • I’m still adjusting to new medications. Some results are excellent, but the downsides remain difficult.
  • Mental Health
    • I did mention I am listening to Whitehouse this week, right? I am about there.

Books

  • See You Tomorrow at the Food Court ⭐⭐⭐⭐
    • This is the wordiest manga I’ve ever read, borderline Light Novel amounts of wall of text. A lot of the humor is pretty subtle in the context of what is going on around the girls as they talk about a topic. Overall, I adored this, but it won’t be for everyone. I also feel like it reads better slowly, a chapter at a time, rather than trying to get through the whole story at once.
  • I Don’t Know Which Is Love Vol 4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • This volume started pretty amazing with some good jokes and fun scenarios. But some of the cracks in the story’s and characters’ ability to keep this fresh for 4+ volumes are starting to show. The MC brushes off some things that are hard to imagine, but we get a setup, hopefully, for a solid volume 5

Music

  • Vylet Pony’s Monarch of Monsters
    • That’s right, three weeks later. Album of the year category. haha
  • Whitehouse’s Bird Seed
    • IDK how I got onto it, but I needed some noise in my life, and who else sits solidly in the early noise scene like Whitehouse? It’s not emotionally healthy music, but maybe that’s where I am.

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

How to NixOS

  • step 1: don’t use flakes.
  • step 2: :blobhaj_reach: ???
  • step 3: just use flakes.

@meluzzy@woof.tech