silverbluep

Codex is very badly structured. I was an early user with codex. But it mixes state and configuration data; which is why I can't really declaratively manage it in my nix-darwin environment; so abandoned it a while ago. This issue being raised, and the way that the codex development responds back to it makes me not trust their harness ever again. I only use codex in opencode; which seems to be doing OK. At least openai doesn't gate their product to their harness like anthropic.

Not trying to sing praises; i think opencode is doing a bunch of weird stuff too but it's not codex level.

The concept is severely overloaded;

- nix primarily is the package manager; basically can be installed anywhere. The big thing is; it builds packages to /nix/ , keeps software there and all the dependencies are done through symlinks to packages in the nix store - nix is also the functional programming language that the nix package manager can take as input - nixos is a framework for writing a system configuration in the nix language; and produces a working linux distribution; integrated with nix. - home-manager is copying the nixos framework, but brings it to userspace management.

The biggest issue getting into home-manager from outside is; it's high learning curve and due to being in the nix ecosystem; there is a lot of concepts that it uses (modules, configuration in functional paradigm) that is a whole lot to learn from 0 just to manage system config, but once things click together, it is wonderful.

To add to what you have found; there is also https://github.com/numtide/system-manager which brings NixOS' declarative system configuration to other distros as well, but I haven't personally used it.

I don't have solutions for you; i want to also keep my KDE settings saved. But I'm full on nixos and home manager so I'm going plasma manager route.

Technically you could use plasma-manager on any distro; you install nix, and use home-manager standalone. I think with KDE; you would want to skip package management, but doable; I used to do with arch.

I guess depends on what you already use for configuration management. Bear in mind; a lot of KDE apps do store state information (window size etc.) inside the config directory and there wasn't an easy way to disentangle config from state when I used to manage my config with a git repo.

This makes me pretty sad. But I'm still hoping i can have a linux arm laptop in my lifetime; maybe in 10-20 years.

I use droid-ify as frontend; and it's been fine to use f-droid repos for most of my needs. I try to install my apps from there in general. Biggest issue for me is android auto capability usually requires the app to be installed from play store (CoMaps) and my music player app (GoneMAD) has a companion unlocker that is from paid app store.

I need banking and bunch of vendor related apps. I need play store for them; so not full on f-droid repos. But close-ish when it comes to phone functionality.

I have been using droid-ify on GrapheneOS for a few years now; because F-Droid ui is terrible, and the privilege extention has been such a pain to configure and get working without issues on my previous lineageOS phone. Happy to see this major overhaul; and i'm glad the FPE is being phased out.

I'm in the same boat; been using linux for the last 15 years. Had to get a mac for work this year due to their logging software not being available on linux.

The laptop quality is great; great sound, battery lasts forever compared to mine (framework). Userspace tools and UI is terrible and have no control over but the hardware and the software integration is top notch. (I live in the terminal, and have nix-darwin to bring my existing setup to mac so it's not jarring most of the time)

Won't look back when I can transition back to linux full time; I'll be so happy. But I can see why people go with apple products. I really hope that ARM laptops become a regular thing.