Bleeding Edge, Nix and Ricing

I love customizing. Anything, everything but, mostly software. I like sharing what I have created. I like showing people how computers can be fun and the fact that there are too many ways we can use it. And I love living in the bleeding edge of things. Not cutting edge, Bleeding. I like using the most alpha of the features.

BUT!

Bleeding edge is named for a reason. You never get the "Polished" experience. That's stable software, ugh!. You face breakage. You need to handle things yourself, and maybe you need to work around the issues that you know there will be. You might bleed. But that's the fun of it.

Nix is one of the best and frkn awesome package managers + configuration tool there is. One of the best because there is guix and docker and things I don't know about. I love it. The best feature that nix has, has been an experimental feature since ages called 'flakes'. It's more streamlined, more portable and more sharable. And it takes it's my time. Writing things in nix is easy when you are standing on the shoulders of giants but when you have to write it yourself. It'll take time. Making multiple changes also needs multiple checkups and evaluations to complete which is a drawback of Nix. Making changes is slow!

Ricing For those who don't know, is a term for "customizing your desktop/interface". has been one of my biggest reason to use Linux. Also the very first reason. Making your computer feel like it's yours, that's ricing. Ricing requires a lot of hit and trials and changes and rebuilds. It's not much of an issue because most configurations live reload. In normal conditions.

Now, when you combine all these three things, having bleeding edge software, using Nix and Ricing. You get my setup. Which is fine when others reference from my work. But, having packages unavailable for Nix; requires you to build it yourself. Not in the normal sense of building, it must be the Nix way. Then, loving to rice means multiple changes, and with Nix, you can forget lazy loading; enjoy waiting minutes which would have been done in milliseconds. Overall, it's not the best experience ricing in Nix. But, Might be the worst when all these things come into play.

So, that was my morning like today. Ricing on Nix with bleeding edge software. Somehow, I love it. Both, the journey and the destination.

Stockholm Syndrome indeed!

Meet me if you want to see the rice. ;D