Hello fellows,

I'm currently looking in 13-14" laptops with no immediate needs for one but just because it's exciting. I love my Dell XPS but I feel I should support companies with which I share more common views. I could make the effort to go a with a less attractive look (especially for bezels) but I don't want to go wrong with hardware so what are your thoughts on Framework, Starlab, Purism, and System76? I'll be running Arch and I tend to have a preference for Framework for now.

Do you have feedback (positive and negative) to share on any of these companies?

Thanks for the knowledge you'll bring me. That'll be extremely useful when time comes to go with a new machine.

Update 1: Still wonderful to be part of such a great community. Thanks for all the great feedback (looking for more :) ).
So far everyone is standing behind Framework. Anyone with a less positive experience or who would like to speak for the other companies?

Update 2: Thank you fellows for the time you've spent to share your honest feedback! I didn't want to influence your inputs but you all confirmed the Framework picture I had in mind. It's a piece of mind to read real world experience so thanks again. I was surprised to not see the system76 community speaks louder. Anyway, when time comes I will (virtually) push Framework shop's door.

A story telling to save me from a therapist consultation.

No space square world. I realize that that this could be my theme philosophy. This is my general approach:

• windows manager: tiling (bspwm)with no spaces, squared windows, no decorations, no visual effects
• theme: transparency and grey background buttons/white text

Over two decades I went from a fancy looking machine to its complete opposite where minimalism is king. How did I make such a big jump?
To make it brief, recreating this comfort look that invaded my real environment felt reassuring at first in my virtual life. But as time went by I noticed that smooth rounded stuff that transiently showed up on my screen created:

• more and more distraction and negatively impacted my productivity
• some frustration when something didn't run as expected because I felt that everything should be as smooth as the appearance of my screen

I would definitely say that I feel way better now and I'm more efficient but I also admit that I've reached an extreme where:

• I don't appreciate screens over 14" anymore because I feel like it's taxing on my eyes movement and again a waste of space
• I don't like wasting a pixel of space if not justified. This is also maybe influenced by preference for small screens
• I need extreme simplicity (which brings efficiency) to all aspects of my workflow. So I use a 36-key split keyboard, a trackball, vim-like keybindings everywhere possible, use terminal as much as I can, use fzf for all my file searches...

Hope you will never end up like me but nice to have friends in this group if it's too late for you ^^

Hello,

The NixOS community has been great in helping me with my first steps in this distro. So I'll ask again few neovim-related issues I couldn't figure out after 3 days of search.

First, let me tell you that I'm trying to import a working neovim setup from another distro. Then let's see how I've configured neovim. I have this in my home.nix file:

programs.neovim = {
  enable = true;
  withPython3 = true;
  extraPython3Packages = (ps: with ps; [
    pynvim
    unidecode
    black
    isort
  ]);
  plugins = with pkgs.vimPlugins; [
    { plugin = *plugin_name*;
    type = "lua";
    config = builtins.readFile *config_file_path*;
    }
    ...
    ];
};

(my init.lua file is in the $HOME/.config/nvim folder)

With that most of my plugins work. Most because few are troublesome. Let's focus on three of them:

1. I have pkgs.vimPlugins.nvim-comment installed but neovim reports that the command CommentToggle is not an editor command

2. I have pkgs.vimPlugins.nvim-treesitter installed but the command TSInstall markdown returns "could not create parser dir '/nix/store/.../nvim-treesitter/parser ': Vim:E739: read-only file system '"

3. I have pkgs.vimPlugins.mason-nvim and pkgs.vimPlugins.mason-lspconfig-nvim installed but runngin checkhealth mason returns few warnings:

• mason.nvim is not the latest version (I use the unstable channel)
• pip: not available spawn: python3 failed with exit code 1 and signal 0. /run/current-system/sw/bin/python3: No module named pip (note that python3_host_prog and python3_host_prog pip are marked "OK")

Thanks again for your assistance.

Hello,

I'm experiencing with NixOS and would like to know what would be the nicest way to add a specific line to a system file.

As an example, how would you configure NixOS so the line
auth sufficient pam_fprintd.so
is added to the /etc/pam.d/doas file? As a bonus, it would be nice to know how to change an option (and not add an entire line) to a system file for which there is no NixOS default extraConfig/extraRules support for.

This would allow me to add this line or not depending on the machine NixOS will be installed on.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

I've been curious about NixOS for quite some time. Reading about it I couldn't see how the config sharing capabilities, setup, or rollabck would be better than Arch and sharing the list of installed packages, using downgrade or chroot.

So I decided to run NixOS in a VM and I'm still confused. An advantage I can see for NixOS is its better use of cores and parallel processing for packages install.

It's clear that I'm missing something so please help me understand what it is.

Edit: Thank you to everyone in this great community! It's always so nice to have a constructive and sane discussion.
After reading so many comments, they all confirm what I've read before and I may realize that my real problem is already having a stable system and no need for the great NixOS options that are very neat but would not benefit my specific and simplistic needs. That being said I can't refrain myself from being curious and will continue testing NixOS.

The need for only 2 config files is the top of the iceberg but hiding more complex configuration to rely on. Not that I really have too much spare time but I do enjoy learning and tweaking NixOS. With its current development state, things are changing a lot so it can keep me busy for months. That's probably what I was mostly looking for: another toy to play with.

Along my journey I will learn a lot about NixOS and may find a feature that will motivate my switch to it. Thanks again for all your precious feedback!

I'll also take this opportunity to share the best help I've found so far to start with NixOS: https://github.com/MatthiasBenaets/nixos-config And his 3 hours (!) video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AGVXJ-TIv3Y