text/gemini
# So much for the Gentoo dream
I have been sold on the idea of "you don't pay for what you don't use" for longer than I can remember. Minimalism and "strictly necessary" was the guiding star that brought me to the Gentoo, Linux from Scratch, djb-style software, suckless project, sysvinit and other nice things. In general, it prompted me to understand deeper the operating system I am using to be able to tell which part of it is not strictly necessary.
Recent years I have been using Nixpkgs, and I did some contributions to fix redundancy or build of reduced configurations, but all too long I have been ignoring the elephant in the room.
=> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/229541 borgmatic: make dependency on systemd conditional
=> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/209080 tup: avoid vendoring sqlite3
I have been using NixOS (pid1 = systemd) for quite some time, but I still cherished a dream that one day, I will be able to build a "strictly necessary" system based on Nixpkgs. Uhm, no.
=> ./2022-03-07.1.gmi Descent into darkness
Rebuild emacs with dbus? Static "dvtm"? Patched "dwm" or "djbdns"? Yeah, sure. How about a sweeping change, like "systemdSupport = false"? Well, that triggers rebuild of the world, including chromium which takes more than a night to build. And I still end up with horrendous blob I have no hope to understand. And it is only getting slower due to the Wirth's Law.
=> https://tildegit.org/kaction/source/src/commit/4f0e7854aeeacb9336d4e956d1815d2e8a5aaa2d/default.nix#L15
=> https://tildegit.org/kaction/source/src/commit/4f0e7854aeeacb9336d4e956d1815d2e8a5aaa2d/config/flake/universe/default.nix#L137
=> https://www.reddit.com/r/Gentoo/comments/i8d9e4/chromium_took_12_hours_to_compile_on_4_cores_cpu Gentoo reddit thread on chromium build times
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
It is not plausible to ever reach the state when I no longer need the chromium, either: Chrome-applications are eating this world. We used to have nice things called "standards" and "protocols", not anymore.
=> ./2021-02-04.1.gmi
=> https://www.statista.com/statistics/272697/market-share-desktop-internet-browser-usa/
We still can have some nice things, but minimalistic every-day system is not one of them.
=> ./2022-04-23.3.gmi
This content has been proxied by September (3851b).