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The dilemma between #Gentoo and #NixOS is this:

The most important value of #Gentoo is configuration/customization and reproducibility comes 2nd.

In case of NixOS those value are reversed. The most important to NixOS is ability to reproduce given setup.

Both of those systems will suit users that value control over their systems very highly (unlike, say, Ubuntu - where the most important value is convenience), but the tie-breaking is between what value out of those two should come 1st.

Imported via Fedimpost from emacs.ch/@xgqt/112581104037953790

Add Flathub-Beta

Add the Flathub-Beta remote repository:

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flatpak remote-add --user flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

Install GIMP beta

Install org.gimp.GIMP form flathub-beta:

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flatpak install --assumeyes --user flathub-beta org.gimp.GIMP

Run GIMP

If you have other GIMP versions installed you will have to specify the “beta” version with //beta.

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flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP//beta

Otherwise you can just run:

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flatpak run org.gimp.GIMP

Also, in the desktop menus (like KRunner) this version of GIMP will have (beta) in its name so there is no chance to miss it.

.NET creates the so-called intermediate objects while building .NET projects, those are located in the “bin” and “obj” directories. The default is not very satisfying, primarily because if a program from a different machine or a container modifies those, then any cached file system paths that are encoded in the objects will be broken. But also it is probably mostly a legacy behavior to have them split between “bin” and “obj” directories.

I prefer for them to say in one - ".cache", because that’s that they are - cache. With the following configuration objects will be stored inside the ".cache" directory. Furthermore, the objects produced by the native machine in the “native” subdirectory and the ones produced by container software in “container” subdirectory.

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<PropertyGroup>
  <CachePath>.\.cache\native</CachePath>
  <CachePath Condition="'$(DOTNET_RUNNING_IN_CONTAINER)' == 'true'">.\.cache\container</CachePath>
  <MSBUildProjectExtensionsPath>$(CachePath)\obj\</MSBUildProjectExtensionsPath>
  <BaseIntermediateOutputPath>$(CachePath)\obj\</BaseIntermediateOutputPath>
  <BaseOutputPath>$(CachePath)\bin\</BaseOutputPath>
</PropertyGroup>

If anybody want to go hardcore and cache the intermediate objects based on the RID or architecture triplet, then this can also be done, for example, by adding environment variables to the path.

Nix is useful for quickly testing out software and providing a strict environment that can be shared between people.

Today I’m trying out Nix again, this time I want to do it my way.

Installation process

Nix store

I know Nix needs “Nix store” installation on / (the system root).

Create it manually to prevent the installation script from calling sudo. 1st I switch to the root account, and then I run:

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mkdir -p -m 0755 /nix
chown -R xy:xy /nix

Running the install script

Download the Nix install script and examine the contents.

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curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install > nix_install.sh

Then, run it with --no-daemon to prevent it running as system service.

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sh ./nix_install.sh --no-daemon

performing a single-user installation of Nix...
copying Nix to /nix/store...
installing 'nix-2.20.1'
building '/nix/store/1ahlg3bviy174d6ig1gn393c23sqlki6-user-environment.drv'...
unpacking channels...
modifying /home/xy/.bash_profile...
modifying /home/xy/.zshenv...
placing /home/xy/.config/fish/conf.d/nix.fish...

Installation finished!  To ensure that the necessary environment
variables are set, either log in again, or type

. /home/xy/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.fish

in your shell.

Wait!

modifying /home/xy/.bash_profile...
modifying /home/xy/.zshenv...
placing /home/xy/.config/fish/conf.d/nix.fish...

That’s very rude!

Stopping Nix from making a mess

I need to prevent Nix from mess up with my environment when I do not want it to. Nix puts some code into the Bash, ZSH and Fish initialization files during installation to ease it’s use. I do not want that since I do not want Nix to meddle with my environment without me knowing it.

I keep my .bash_profile and .zshenv in a stow-managed git repo so I can just cd into my repo and do git reset --hard, but for you will have to revert those files to their old forms manually.

Playing with Nix

We do not have nix in PATH but we still can launch it. Nix executables are located inside ~/.nix-profile/bin/.

By invoking nix-shell one can create a ephemeral environment containing only packages specified after the -p flag. I always add -p nix to have the Nix tools available also inside the spawned environment.

I will test out chibi (small Scheme interpreter) + rlwrap (REPL support for software lacking it) inside a Nix ephemeral environment:

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~/.nix-profile/bin/nix-shell -p nix chibi rlwrap

Inside the spawned shell:

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rlwrap chibi-scheme

In the chibi REPL, let’s see the contents of the PATH environment variable:

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(get-environment-variable "PATH")

And exit the Scheme REPL:

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(exit)

After the playtime, run garbage collection:

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~/.nix-profile/bin/nix-collect-garbage

.NET ecosystem in Gentoo in year 2023

The Gentoo Dotnet project introduced better support for building .NET-based software using the nuget, dotnet-pkg-base and dotnet-pkg eclasses. This opened new opportunities of bringing new packages depending on .NET ecosystem to the official Gentoo ebuild repository and helping developers that use dotnet-sdk on Gentoo.

New software requiring .NET is constantly being added to the main Gentoo tree, among others that is:

• PowerShell for Linux,
• Denaro — finance application,
• Ryujinx — NS emulator,
• OpenRA — RTS engine for Command & Conquer, Red Alert and Dune2k,
• Pinta — graphics program,
• Pablodraw — Ansi, Ascii and RIPscrip art editor,
• Dafny — verification-aware programming language
• many packages aimed straight at developing .NET projects.

Dotnet project is also looking for new maintainers and users who are willing to help out here and there. Current state of .NET in Gentoo is very good but we can still do a lot better.

Special thanks to people who helped out

• Anna Figueiredo Gomes
• Esteve Varela Colominas
• Andrew Udvare

Links to bugs and announcements

• Bugs
  • gentoo-dotnet–2023/1
  • 900597
• Github PRs
  • 21112
  • 21451
  • 29309
  • 32109
  • 33940
• Active Gentoo .NET projects
  • gentoo-dotnet-guide
  • gentoo-dotnet-maintainer-tools
  • csharp-gentoodotnetinfo
  • eselect-dotnet
  • eselect-pwsh

Portage as a CD system

This is a very simple way to use any system with Portage installed as a Continuous Delivery server.

I think for a testing environment this is a valid solution to consider.

Create a repository of software used in your organization

Those articles from the Gentoo Wiki describe how to create a custom ebuild repository (overlay) pretty well:

• Ebuild repository
• Creating an ebuild repository

Set up your repo with eselect-repository

Install the my-org repository:

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eselect repository add my-org git https://git.my-org.local/portage/my-org.git

Sync my-org:

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emerge --sync my-org

Install live packages of a your software

First, enable live packages (keywordless) for your my-org repo:

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echo '*/*::my-org' >> /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/0000_repo_my-org.conf

Install some packages from my-org:

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emerge -av "=mycategory/mysoftware-9999"

Install smart-live-rebuild

smart-live-rebuild can automatically update live software packages that use git as their source URL.

Set up cron to run smart-live-rebuild

Refresh your my-org repository every hour:

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0 */1 * * * emerge --sync my-org

Refresh the main Gentoo tree every other 6th hour:

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0 */6 * * * emerge --sync gentoo

Run smart-live-rebuild every other 3rd hour:

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0 */3 * * * smart-live-rebuild

Restarting services after update

All-in-one script

You can either restart all services after successful update:

File: /opt/update.sh

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#!/bin/sh

set -e

smart-live-rebuild

systemctl restart my-service-1.service
systemctl restart my-service-2.service

Crontab:

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0 */3 * * * /opt/update.sh

Via ebuilds pkg_ functions

File: my-service-1.ebuild

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pkg_postinst() {
    systemctl restart my-service-1.service
}

More about pkg_postinst:

• pkg_postinst
• Phase Functions

Example Gentoo overlays

• xgqt/myov
• gentoo-racket/gentoo-racket-overlay
• gentoo-mirror/guru

Firefox began as the first open source browser to live through the browser wars, overcoming Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and continues to deliver competition-smashing technology to this day.

Chromium code

The only advantages of Chromium are that it was adopted by Electron and spread partially because of a more liberal license and Google’s own efforts.

Google will never be able to cope with the worst imaginable code base of Chromium.

Chromium is near-impossible to compile

On a 4cores/8threads Ryzen CPU Chromium compiles in ~12h and requires at least 20GB of disk space for build. At the same time Firefox compiles in ~1.5h and requires ~8GB for disk space.

Programming language adoption

Additionally Firefox team was able to rewrite a very large portion of Firefox codebase in Rust which improved the browser’s safety. There were attempts to add rust to Chromium but they all are in more of a addon-like fashion.

Porting to UNIXes

Because Chromium is extremely large it’s very hard to port and maintain for Linux and BSD based systems. There were numerous bugs with Chromium’s UI on Linux that cause crashes on pressing random controls. I believe Google has no Linux testers beside the “free software freeloaders” (wink, wink, IBM :P).

Anti-competition

This days Google has to result to dirty tactics where certain Google-owned websites would either refuse to work on Firefox or give a fake performance hit that is entirely caused by malicious JavaScript code.

Several popular FOSS-related sources have covered this news recently, check them out on the WWW.