So things have changed rather a lot since I last wrote about my, Linux journey? I guess. Looking back, I had been using openSUSE, but in the meantime migrated over to Arch Linux yet have recently landed on NixOS which feels oddly right. It is strange though, I was fairly happy with my Arch setup and was not really seeing myself switching, when I stumbled upon a blog post describing a non-persistent NixOS setup. Essentially, the idea is, since NixOS can boot from only the /nix directory, make the rest non-persistent in some way¹, and then create some sort of system with either mounts or symlinks to store only the things you actually care about between boots. Before this, I hadn’t really seen the appeal of Nix; sure the whole language is pretty nice and there is a certain elegance in descriptively building your system, but it just felt like I would end up doing different sorts of “hacks” to get some things working and forget about them thus rendering the Nix code incomplete. This approach forces me to be explicit about everything I do² which means it’s actually oddly satisfying to use since I know I’m not accumulating cruft over time.

My setup

I’m using impermanence to manage the linking with three partitions in total: one for /boot, one for /nix and finally one for /nix/persist where impermanence links anything I actually want persisted. As mentioned above, / is mounted on a tmpfs, meaning it’s store in RAM³ and as such gets erased when the computer is powered off. On my desktop I am “cheating” a bit since I do have a separate SSD for games that is then mounted separately for my Steam library and Bottles… bottles, but everything else including flatpaks is managed through my Nix configuration.

It’s oddly freeing not to really have to think about trying out some software since I know it won’t really persistently mess up anything, and with how many things are available through nixpkgs it’s been really convenient to just try things out as necessary⁴ and keep the base system clean. It really does give that fresh install feel constantly, which is awesome.

Drawbacks

At the same time, it does mean that anything not available through nixpkgs is a bit more effort to try out since NixOS doesn’t follow the FHS and as such some prebuilt binaries that work fine in other distros don’t realy work without effort; this is especially a problem with proprietary software, since I can’t just build the binaries myself. Luckily this isn’t a huge use-case for me outside of gaming for which I have Steam and Bottles, so I’ve mostly been able to avoid this problem, but it is still something that has come up.

The other minor annoyance is the need to rebuild the system to apply configuration changes, which can be especially annoying when I am in the middle of customizing something. Now, yes, I can just use mkOutOfStoreSymlink to use dotfiles in a normal manner (which means it once again becomes easier for me to configure things in an ad-hoc manner), or use things like --config launch arguments to start the software with a different configuration file or directory, but both of those are extra things I need to take into account while making changes. All in all, not a huge issue, but still something to be aware of.

Conclusion

For now, I’m quite happy with this setup, and I don’t really see myself changing it anytime in the near future. It feels like a good compromise of stability (with the previous “generations” being available at boot) and customizability with pretty cutting-edge features and packages. I do, at times, miss the good old paru -Syu to just get everything up-to-date, but I think I’ve arrived at a good place for me.

So it has ended up being quite a while since I last wrote something here, yet it simultaneously feels like not that long ago; time can sometimes be strange like that. It’s a bit of a pity that I’ve written less lately, though I also don’t really know what I would have written in the intervening time; it doesn’t really feel like that much has happened, even though it has.

I guess a short recap might be somewhat useful, for my own sake if nothing else: I’ve ended up stopping playing World of Warcraft (for now, at least, though I’m not really feeling a return). I’ve kind of gotten into a cycle of rotating between mostly some Paradox games, namely Crusader Kings III, Stellaris, with a bit of Victoria 3 thrown it at times for good measure. I’ve continued my fascination with RPGs by replaying Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous a couple of times, as well as playing some Baldur’s Gate 3 (which is quite a nice game).

On the more personal front, it was quite interesting reading through some of the drafts I had saved here, it felt like they had ended up being unpublished mostly because they were too personal, which made them work sort of like a diary now that I revisited them. It also showed me that my mood hasn’t changed all that much; there has been some small improvement I do think, but the overall vibe seems to remain largely the same. I suppose some of that is merely part of my personality and how I react to things and less to do with my mood, really, but it was still interesting to read.

As for what the future holds, I still don’t really know. I think I would like writing here more often, but I’m not quite sure how to achieve that. On the one hand, I had the time when I was trying to just write something, anything, every week or so, and while that did end up working out quite well I also found it quite stressful. On the other hand, just writing when I feel like it doesn’t really seem to work either, since it seems I don’t really end up thinking about doing it all that often when I don’t put it as a priority and as such forget to write anything at all. There must be some middle ground between forcing myself and forgetting completely, but I haven’t found that yet.

So it’s been some time again since I last posted, which I feel like is to be expected at this point. I think I’ve just ended up being busy, or rather not really thinking about writing as much lately, and as such also ended up writing a lot less. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) I’d like to rename this blog to, as while I’m not sure how fitting the name currently is I also don’t really have any ideas what I’d like to change it to.

What I have changed, however, is moving the blog back to Hugo. This change was caused by a few things:

1. I wanted to move away from Cloudflare for all my services (this blog was the final thing that still needed moving)
2. I wanted to move away from using Ghost as my backend because they are deprecating MariaDB which I want to continue using over MySQL—I just don’t trust Oracle to be a good actor
3. Since I was changing things up anyway, I took the opportunity to simplify things, and moved back to a pure SSG-setup
4. I chose Hugo over continuing to use Eleventy because I would now be self-hosting these things instead of throwing everything into the cloud, and as such I just prefer having a single binary instead of the mess that is a JS-installation¹

I did do some exploring of other headless CMS but ended up deciding against moving to something else since I just kind of worried that I might end up in the same position I was in already with Ghost where I have to move again or the like due to some dependency changing, and also because it just ended up being one less thing that I need to maintain which is nice. I also don’t really have any problem with writing things in Markdown or other markup languages so the appeal of a more visual editor just isn’t really there for me. Sure, there are some convenience things that are a lot easier that I covered when I was first thinking of moving off Hugo and onto WordPress, but many of those things ended up being not that useful for me. For example, in the last iteration I already didn’t have any comments, because that ended up being annoying to implement with the headless setup I was using anyway; as for things like scheduling posts, I did it for fun several times but I’m just not sure if it adds any real value at the moment.²

I also used this opportunity to fix/re-implement some of the redirects I had going on before, that broke when I migrated over to Eleventy I think? This should mean some links that were broken should be working again now, which is nice. I feel somewhat embarassed about having contributed to link rot because of how frustrated I get at times when I see it on other sites, so hopefully all of that is fixed now. Other than that, as far as reader-facing changes go, there shouldn’t really be any yet.

Well, except for one small thing: the format of the links got somewhat updated again, all of my posts are now under the /post/ subfolder, or section as Hugo calls them. It doesn’t really affect the experience of browsing the site, but the links look a bit different once again.³

What sections mean, however, is that I can more clearly delineate some of the rough draft ideas I’ve had sitting around for a bit: dreams and fiction. It somehow didn’t (or at least doesn’t anymore) feel quite right to post these things simply into the main feed, but I have on occasion been writing my dreams down when I found them particularily interesting as a sort of dream diary, and it feels like sharing them under a different section from the main blog could be interesting. If I do end up doing that (still just thinking about the idea, but the change makes it easier to implement if I end up wanting to), it probably won’t mean that I would publish every dream I have, just the ones that seem interesting enough to do so with for whatever reason; maybe because they deal with a particular topic that might be of interest to someone else than me, or because they are just that strange.

As for fiction, it’s also something I kind of do want to write but never end up sitting down and just doing. I think one of my problesm there is that I like having done things more than doing them, so I get impatient while writing something like that and want to finish it which doesn’t really fit with my goal of also writing something somewhat longer form and as such my interest ends up fizzling out before I have the opportunity to finish actually writing anything. So I guess that means we’ll see if anything ever comes out of my idea to also include some fiction writing on this site, but at least the idea is there.

Beyond that, I’m also considering re-introducing a way to comment or at least somehow communicate back to me. As it stands, I don’t really give out any identifying information or channels to contact me on this blog, which while it has served me well so far I’m not sure if it is the way I want to keep things. Sure, the last time around when I had comments they weren’t really used, but maybe something like an about-page where I at the very least list an email address or some way to contact me might be a good thing to have available (though I have no doubt I would end up getting mostly spam to any such address).

For now though, that ends my ramblings on this topic, and I’ll get back to considering how to proceed from here. I would still kind of like to write more, but about what?

Felt like it was time to freshen up the blog again, even though I haven’t been writing as actively anymore. Just new colors, the layout/functionality has remained basically the same—though I did fix a small bug that occurred when a post didn’t have any tags. Also went back to specifying the font used instead of user preference, since this font just felt right.

It feels like I at some point need to rethink the branding on here, “Rambling Priest” just doesn’t really feel right anymore, not representative of who I am or the content. Probably should go with something that isn’t such a reference to World of Warcraft anymore since the content isn’t necessarily focused around the game anymore and more just about me and who I am. Not sure where to go with that as of yet though, so I suppose I’ll let it lie for now.

I didn’t end up writing about it at the time—which I now kind of regret since I’m no longer quite sure when exactly it was—but I ended up trying Linux again. Looking back at last time, it doesn’t necessarily feel like all that much has changed—though I don’t have the stuttering in World of Warcraft any more—except for perhaps no longer streaming and as such not having the hassle of setting that up, yet I’ve by now used it for several months and just been content.

There have certainly been some minor annoyances still, especially with how badly Battle.net performs, but overall it’s just been rather uneventful.

It feels a bit anticlimactic even, because I guess I was somehow expecting the change to be a bigger deal, which of course was a very misguided expectation but still. One of the really nice things however, is how much better the keyboard layouts are on Linux; specifically how many more things are accessible with Alt Gr or angry Alt.

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for months because I’m honestly just not sure what to say since it all has just been so normal, but somehow it still feels right posting about it since I’ve mentioned trying Linux before. So that’s the update I guess.