dotCaffe

You’re me! Though I’m closely following the progress of the R and Jupyter extensions for vscode. They’re not an RStudio replacement yet, but I think soon R will be comparable to python in vscode, and I’d love to consolidate.

Thanks! I ended up messing with Nixos a bunch in the past few weeks. My impression is generally positive, though while many of the things it does are very elegant (like the gnome example you mentioned), a lot of it also seems a bit hacky. Ultimately, figuring out how to declaratively configure specific things seems to take so much more time than my current approach of a written document detailing the steps of setting up my system.

I’m going to keep tinkering in a VM though, and maybe I’ll have a breakthrough. Keeping configs working across two computers especially is tempting (read: an excuse to get a second computer).

One last question - one of the things I worked on was Firefox with home manager. How did you get it set up so bookmarks were included in the config?

Nix has been on my mind for a while, but I’ve been hesitant to go all in. Unfortunately, messing around a bit with VMs I still don’t feel like I have a good handle on how it all works.

One question I’d ask you is how much upfront work it is to get, say, a stable setup for a laptop where all of the little things are working (opening/closing the lid, connecting to external screen, switching audio outputs, media keys. Laptop stuff!)

As context, a long time ago I ran Gentoo and later Arch, so I’m not technically clueless, but eventually decided to switch to easier distros that came with a reasonable system defaults that works out of the box. I’m super interested in NixOS for all the reasons you mentioned, but worried about how time I’ll end up spending just getting that config file to where I want it!

This reminds me of https://slrpnk.net/post/280323, about doing similar things with old Chromebooks. I definitely think there should be a movement toward using random older devices for hobbyist projects. I mean, there’s nothing actually special about the RPi, just that it’s small and enough people use it that they can pre-prepare software for that specific hardware. But it should only be a little more work to make just about any computer do the things that people use the pi for. I think the possibility of a bigger movement is there!

Regarding the battery overheating, correct me if I’m wrong but I thought generally the electronics would keep that from happening. Of course, keeping it always on charge would probably degrade the battery life of the device, but once a phone is on server duty that’s not so much of a concern anyway.