Enough with "world files are great". What are they?

I only recently realized that I've only talked about using world files, but never really explained their purpose. I'll try to break down what they are used for, and why knoming how they work is a useful thing. World files are a record of everything that is installed on the system explicitly. When you install, say Firefox, it will not be the only thing that needs installed. It uses shared libraries for audio, video, and many other things, but you generally don't care about any of that. You want Firefox, so you explicitly pull that in. All of the other dependencies are the package manager's problem, and are not recorded in a world file. This is a conenient place that you can go to in order to eassily see what's intentionally installed, let you clean out lines of things you don't care about and even things you have forgotten about over the ages.

How I'm currently using nix

I've gotten a few questions surrounding how I'm using nix at this point in my workflow. Even without knowing much of it yet, I've managed to work a bit of it into my daily workflow. I'm typing this on my laptop which I rarely need to rely on as a test bed for NixOS. This lets me play with things that I may or may not like on a daily use system, server, ect, all without interrupting my daily workflow. Thus far, it's forced a few changes to my dotfiles, which isn't super uncommon for supporting a new Linux distro. Most notably, I had to remove launching Sway on tty1 login, though it's likely a lack of understanding on how that works.

My primary use thus far for nix has been using it with home-manager to replace my userspace on my Mac Mini and now this laptop. The ultimate intent is to be able to keep all of my userspace portable to my servers as well, or if I end up back on Fedora, I can still have a uniform userspace without touching the core immutable OS underneath it. With home-manager acting as a stand in for world files in the OS/pmm, it keeps it all centralized. I have not decided if I want to use tooling such as nix-darwin due to it's increased chance of breaking on MacOS updates. If my userspace is broken, that's one thing, but I'm not sure how much power it has over the host system and if it would be able to soft brick on updates. Further research and testing will need done.

Because of the lack of nix-darwin, unless I'm missing something, I don't believe that I can get full integration with GUI applications on Mac, which causes some minor inconeniences. The first place that I had noticed this is having emacs installed through homebrew which I tend to do things like compiling and other tasks through. Because it's not tightly integrated into tooling like nix-direnv, it can't see the tooling made avaliable. It's not a deal breaker to me as I'm used to working in an external terminal already, though I do intend to solve it if possible and the gains outweigh any costs associated. Only time will tell.

What is nix, and why should I care?

This exact question is why I avoid nix for so long. Specifically the "what is nix?" half. Nix is not one thing, but a collection of many things when most people say "nix". I wanted to clarify what things are to the best of my knowledge and give others what I had trouble finding in one convenient location when I was not knowing anything about nix in hopes that you understand better what things are, why I'm so pedantic, and possibly enable you to give things a shot with at least a direction to go that I had such trouble finding. With that out of the way, what the heck is it?!

Portable dev environments

In my journey to uncruft my system, I started looking at even uncrufting my user's footprint as well. I found myself bringing in a ton of things for misc dev work. One project I may use Nim, another Python, another I need Zola for this blog, and it started adding up. I knew there had to be a better way. In comes nix-direnv. If you have done development, you may already be familiar with direnv which is great for keeping your system clean in general. I won't repeat everything when there are good links to things, but direnv is built to keep your env vars that are project specific out of your local system, and nix-direnv extends that now to packages! Instead of rambling, I'll show you a simple demo that I actually use on this blog.

Nix is... wild

So I decided that I was going to try nix as my attempt to remove my state from the system, and didn't realize the size of the rabbit hole that I had fallen into. I thought I was getting access to a package manager that I'd bend into shape like I had with Gentoo in the past with their world files. Turns out that Nix does that really well. I figured that I would enjoy parts of it as I've moved closer and closer to it in the years without realizing, but I didn't know what I would uncover. Before I get sidetracked, let's get this out of the way.

I changed the site!

A friend decided to ditch social media and is moving to RSS and Atom feeds, and my old blog was broken in terms of feeds. I didn't ever know how pelican worked, so I figured there wasn't a good reason to fight it if I could try something new, and here we are. The site is being generated by zola now, which has been an interesting transition. Once I got used to things being different, it seems to work a fair bit better, though I haven't noticed the speed aspect. I am on some decently fast hardware, and it's a small site, but features like broken link checking is a nice bonus. I'll open source the site soon and make sure to link to it, but you can see all of my projects on gitea now conveniently linked at the top with the new atom feed. I'm tired of staring at text, so I'm going to keep this one short, but wanted to christen the site with a new post at least. ✌️

Update: The site is fully open source here and will hopefully continue to beb updated there as my old blog was.

I'm beyond tired of computers failing

I've been on a quest lately to get computers to just "go away"™. When I've least expected it, they have alwasy broken. Taken an update, or just decided one day that it didn't want to boot, or acted in a strange way such as no audio, out of date configs, the list goes on. These days, I am not in the mood to deal with breakage at the most random of times. Things like my laptop get booted at most a few times a year, and I really don't want it to be broken on that rare time that I need it. This hasn't just applied to the laptop, but servers as well. For a long while, I was able to just avoid 99% of it by not using SystemD, but it's now even hitting my Artix systems, both the laptop, and a server that I thought I could be too lazy to switch away from because there was no SystemD. That was a mistake it turns out, and has lead me to where I am now.

Stepping up the audio ladder

I've finally decided to venture away from Schiit DACs into something truly R2R. The Ares II is well regarded as a true endgame DAC for most people, and the price tag is certainly higher than anything else I've owned, costing about 3x what the current price of my Hifiman Sundara are going for, and this is just a DAC. That said, I was looking to up my audio experience, heard amazing things about it, and I'll let you know what I found with my equipment.

Stepping up the game from the Magni

Why not the Magni?

I gave the Magni 3 a glowing review, and said that everyone getting into audio should own one. I stand by that. Moving up from the Magni there's 2 direct options. The Magnius, and the Asgard 3. These both have substantial power overhead compared the the poor little magni with it's wall wart of a power brick. The big feature difference between these in terms of physical features is that the Magnius is pretty much 2 magni in one box, and balanced, where the Asgard does away with balanced in favour of raw power through single ended output.

A whole lot of detail, even to a fault

Where to even start on this DAC. Features... All of the features... This is a balanced DAC, so expect to want a balanced AMP with this one. Inputs galore. USB, coax digital, optical, AES, and even bluetooth. If you have a thing that you want to make sound, this can probably do it. It can output both to balanced, or single ended, so this will work with pretty much any amp or powered monitors. It is built as a balanced architecture and will sound best as such, but it's nice that it offers both.