So this laptop needs a reinstall... Should I give guix system a go?...

Dave Anderson

@arichtman It left a bad taste because iirc it was literally the first set of tools/activities I tried after a basic install and clicking around a bit, and it just faceplanted immediately. I later learned that I mostly got unlucky and happened to zone in on a slightly gnarly known issue, but still

/etc/init.d/witch.navi

@danderson no one has written that yet, but otoh yes

say you have two partitions A/B, and you booted into A
you can emerge your updates into B by giving portage the --root flag, then set so that next boot B gets mounted instead of A

it'd be a new quite complex project to do though

Dave Anderson

@navi ok so to a first approximation that's a "no" because nixos has burned me out quite hard on trying to do fancy OS things for the first time, and I need more time to recover

Maybe a btrfs root and snapshots is realistically enough for what I want though?... Snapshot before emerging a new config, if it goes hilariously wrong roll back to snapshot. Being able to jump to any version of any config hermetically is cool but realistically I used it as an "aaah shit it's all broken" rescue.

/etc/init.d/witch.navi

@danderson oh, yes

i focused on the A/B thing you mentioned and forgot about that

btrfs snapshots work perfect for this and iirc you can easily rollback / boot an older one

Dave Anderson

@dunderhead I like it when I'm not forced to participate in capitalism, and have time to just wander off on sidequests. But when my OS is actively preventing me from doing the thing I need in order to eat, the sidequests are more stressful and rageful than fun

Dave Anderson

@navi oh is there some reasonable early boot support for btrfs rollbacks these days? Nixos does that all within initrd in its own weird little way so I have no idea what the state of the art is any more. Sounds like I should go explore!

Dave Anderson

@navi oh another question if I can burden you: in your semi-declarative setup, is there a reasonable way to "diff" your base profiles vs. what you installed by hand? Back in the day my Debian and Arch installs tended to go to hell by a thousand tiny adhd cuts of me installing random things and config tweaks and having no good way to see the delta and unwind it back into my "declarative" configs.

/etc/init.d/witch.navi

@danderson profiles go into your portage overlay, which usually you check in by git

meanwhile things you installed by hand go in /var/lib/portage/world

so, those two package lists never touch, you can erase that world file and tell portage to depclean, and it'll remove everything not in the profiles

Dave Anderson

@navi oooh, okay I thought this was a chef-like "apply a baseline config but everything's one big pot" situation. Okay clearly I know much less than I think about how gentoo ticks and I should go learn. Thanks for the wisdom!

/etc/init.d/witch.navi

@danderson i'm an openrc maintainer and soon-to-be gentoo dev

feel free to ask any questions you have

Dave Anderson

@navi I think I've determined that my understanding of gentoo needs a complete retooling before I can ask useful questions, my knowledge right now boils down to "I dunno USE flags and recompiling stuff a lot and turning on lots of optimizations", from a very brief encounter with a gentoo user... wow probably 20 years ago now. I have a lot of catching up to do!

Raven667

@danderson I dunno, maybe not what you are looking for and not helpful, but I've been having good luck with Fedora Silverblue using rpm-ostree and flatpak. The ability to layer on RPMs from Fedora-compatible repos but have a clear distinction from the base system has helped keep things "clean". I'm still not totally used to tools having so much their own environments with flatpak, it'd be nice to figure out how to get vscodium to edit, with dev tools, inside a toolbox container but it works OK