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Descent into darkness

For some time after 2019-12-29, I tried to maintain separation between my $dayjob computer -- one that by necessity has Skype, Dropbox, Slack, and Google Hangouts, and my personal one where I mostly worked in /dev/tty1 and only started X session with dwm(1) and surf(1) occasionally.

My personal computer eventually died, and after some hesitation, I moved personal stuff to the big MacBook Pro, provided by my employer. For some time I kept separate virtual machines for $dayjob and personal stuff, but the friction of maintaining forks of my configurations convinced me to merge everything into a single virtual machine. Linux virtual machine with vim(1), tinyssh(8) and runit(8) as init system. Tiny realm of sanity in a mad world.

Last week that computer got hardware issue, so to repair it, I had to part with it for 3-5 business days. These are numbers quoted by the repair shop. Luckily, I was able to get a hold of decent Dell Precision 5550, also provided by my employer.

The good part: nice keyboard, nice screen, Ubuntu instead of Windows out-of-box. The bad part: UEFI-only boot, at h-node.org similar model has rating C. I had to get it up to speed, including sound, microphone, and Google Hangouts, within 48 hours.

I thought of setting up Alpine, but imagined tinkering with alsactl(1) and decided against it. Coward, I know. Instead, I decided to use something out-of-boxy. I made my mind to give NixOS a try, and should it fail, fall back on Ubuntu.

Fallback wasn't necessary. With several lines in "configuration.nix" I got fully functional KDE environment, with probably another hour and half of web search I got rest missing pieces working. It would probably have taken much longer for somebody who doesn't know, e.g that when you want a sound indicator, you need to search for "pulseaudio" and "kmix".

Now I have an operating system with "systemd" as the init system and a lot of crap in general; overwhelmingly more crap than necessary to necessary. E.g, most printer drivers are not used, but I don't know which exactly. But hey, I am rich, I have 32Gb of RAM and two SSD disks, 1Tb each.

Unlike my previous Linux systems, where I knew the reason for pretty much every file, the complexity of this system is orders of magnitude greater than my skull. Well, it happens to work, and NixOS has a nice rollback feature, so yeah, I can roll back from one black box to another.

I must feel hatred, fury, and frustration and desire to fight back, but I don't; I am content with having a terminal emulator and nix-env(1) in it. What I do feel is guilt/shame that my indifference today devalues all my devotion in past years. I am no different from those I used to despise.

Ironically, the move from a mostly unfree system (MacOS) to mostly free one (NixOS) became yet another step of descent into darkness.