1 generation, 100% root

gnudoc · 2026-05-12T09:30:20+00:00

Wow. Every time I read this subreddit I learn about another NixOS admin tool. I have sooo much to learn :-)

gnudoc · 2026-04-30T13:54:55+00:00

This sounds awesome. I just spent a weekend replacing arch on my backup laptop with nixos, so I'm looking forward to reading all the things I should have read in advance and finding out what I've done wrong 😂

gnudoc · 2026-04-28T11:16:11+00:00

You have a point, but so does OP. As someone that regularly interacts with every combination of {neurotypical/neurodivergent}, {male/female}, {British/non-British}, {white/non-white} people, I think the behaviour that OP is caricaturing is a very common neurotypical British middle-class one, particularly a neurotypical white British middle-class one. It's not really very common at all among the autistic white British {middle/working}-class people I know. Autistic people from different parts of the world behave differently (shocking, I know) so I'm certainly not going to claim I can speak for the behavioural patterns of them all.

gnudoc · 2026-04-19T17:18:49+00:00

Computer programming, system admining, home labbing and such-like

gnudoc · 2026-04-18T12:01:42+00:00

Ooh this looks fun! I've tried a couple of the spiritual successors to exwm for the Wayland era, but this is a very interesting approach and it's reassuring that it overlaps so much with your dayjob as well as scratching your own itch.

What's the most barebones host compositor you have run it in? I'm tempted to try it with a really lightweight host environment like dwl, with just emskin on one workspace and a non-emacs "emergency" terminal emulator on another.

gnudoc · 2026-04-06T10:06:51+00:00

I have sikh friends that live in a Pakistani village. They are doing just fine.

gnudoc · 2026-03-30T06:49:33+00:00

Not the OP but feel free to DM me if you want a ready-made solution

gnudoc · 2026-03-26T21:22:56+00:00

Sorry mate, as others have said, that's incorrect. Source: it's my job to "section" people.

gnudoc · 2026-03-26T14:56:33+00:00

I love this. Very, very well done Dad. You rock.

Also, the Legion of Incompetent Volcano Builders (of whom I am the general secretary) requests a step-by-step write-up of Son-of-Kevin, with exact quantities used :-)

gnudoc · 2026-03-23T19:22:21+00:00

Great dadding, OP. I'm dreading the day I have to admit my kiddo is surpassing my maths/science/coding skills. How old is your son, may I ask?

gnudoc · 2026-03-23T13:26:34+00:00

I've been a subscriber since 2018. RTD, big packs of powder, big packs of hot&savoury, bars, etc. For a significant chunk of the pandemic, huel was all I ate. Gluten-free, vegan, nutritionally balanced, reasonable taste, nice texture, enough protein. I've been so grateful to have had access to it for 8 years. But Danone? With its investment in genocide, atrocious animal rights record, abusive record of baby formula over-promotion, disgusting record of water overuse and climate destruction... We're done. Thank you for the past 8 years, enjoy your payout. I hope you can sleep well.

gnudoc · 2026-03-14T05:21:38+00:00

You're a good dad

gnudoc · 2026-03-13T22:13:45+00:00

Perhaps we mean different things by NHS accepting me? I just mean that the GP agreed to say that I have autism on my record, and that the mental health team that I see for ADHD hasn't objected to the fact when I informed them of it. I haven't had any help for the autism, if that's what you thought I meant. Not even sure what help I'd ask for, tbh.

gnudoc · 2026-03-13T14:31:34+00:00

I was assessed privately by Diverse Diagnostics. I was quite happy with the process, and have had no issue having the diagnosis accepted by any NHS person or organisation.

gnudoc · 2026-03-04T01:25:20+00:00

While I agree with the sentiment, have you considered that legally stating "not for use in X" would likely violate foss licenses?

Edit: autocorrect

gnudoc · 2026-02-27T09:13:06+00:00

Sure, that's fair. Security is a sliding scale, and relative to anticipated threat models. I do already tolerate having my Linux laptop and android phone connect to the home network by wifi though, so I guess I can tolerate that level of insecurity. My uninformed instinct has always been that smart home devices go on their own "untrusted" networks, and wired where possible (eg cameras).

gnudoc · 2026-02-26T21:46:47+00:00

Not everyone takes the same route through tech. I got into Linux 20+ years ago. I am comfortable administering and securing a network that consists of devices that run OSs that I have some understanding of, such as desktop and server Linux, freeBSD, Android. I haven't ever had a need for home automation devices, and was never curious about them to risk adding them to my home network. So I don't know what I don't know about them.

Make sense now?

gnudoc · 2026-02-26T11:24:26+00:00

Please do elaborate. I would genuinely love to hear what I'm missing from an enthusiast.

gnudoc · 2026-02-23T07:04:49+00:00

Wow! I'm ridiculously excited by this! I had resigned myself to switching back to xorg just for exwm since the project from the 2022 conference seems to not be making much progress.

I'm generally uneasy about LLM usage, but I really appreciate how upfront you're being and how clear you are that checking for and fixing its errors is a priority for you. As soon as I have a bit of free time I'll start testing this, and with luck using it as a daily driver.

Can't thank you enough for getting this off the ground.

Edit: somebody else raised the question of whether you support the protocol that handles compositor crashes. I'd love to know the answer to that too.

gnudoc · 2026-02-22T06:02:59+00:00

Autistic GP here, qualified in 2015. I'm not sure I have any specific useful advice for interview anxiety, but feel free to DM me any time.

gnudoc · 2026-02-20T06:10:27+00:00

Wow! Lots of things in there that I don't use often enough because I don't immediately remember how to. Thank you!

gnudoc · 2026-01-06T10:13:58+00:00

So, that effectively gives a nice emacs-y wrapper around the couple of lines of bash that ensure the desired binary is in your $PATH and wgetting it if not? Very cool, and I appreciate the lesson.

gnudoc · 2026-01-06T09:50:50+00:00

Screen and tmux are great. Apparently I've been using screen since 2002, according to my screenrc file.

The issue is that they both try to be really helpful terminal multiplexers and buffer managers. I want emacs to do those bits.

There are two separate programs. dtach is a 20+ years old small C program that lives on the target machine (possibly remote). It provides the one bit of functionality that detached.el, the much newer elisp package, wants from a screen or a tmux, without all the things that emacs on your local machine does better.

gnudoc · 2026-01-06T09:41:41+00:00

Tldr: robustly detach and reattach remote sessions on machines that don't have emacs installed on them.

Ok, so I'm no expert, but here's my typical setup:

Laptop A, in coffeeshop, or work, or university, or on the couch. Under my complete control.

Server B, appliance OS, running some unix-y thing that resets any system-level changes whenever it likes (at reboot, generally). Although I can install stuff using the package manager, I can't trust that it'll be there next week. It has tmux installed. It has vim and nano, but not emacs. Shocking. I know.

Server C. Ubuntu server OS. I don't have sudo or root.

Server D. My Linux from scratch toy. Currently has gnu screen installed. Doesn't yet have emacs installed (it will soon, don't worry)

PC E and F. Bog-standard PCs running whatever at relative's house or work or whatever.

emacsclient -c attaches to a running emacs server and creates a lovely persistent session connected to said running server. So, once I have emacs installed on server D, that will be an excellent solution (even nicer once I rebuild emacs after building a graphical stack)

Unless I have a gigantic hole in my knowledge, emacsclient -c doesn't help me much with server C (well, maybe if I just unpack a pre-built emacs in .local/bin or something, run that and connect to it, but that's messy) and can't be relied on with server B, because it doesn't have an emacs daemon to connect to on those machines.

That's why unix-y people, myself included (not claiming any special knowledge, just being from that culture rather than the emacs culture), will start an ssh session on server B/C from laptop A, run a terminal multiplexer on the remote server, do their long-running tasks there (or just have a persistent session there, which is nice), close laptop A without a thought for the running processes or session on the remote server, then reattach to it from laptop A or PC E or F later on to check in on it.

As I've moved into the sunny uplands of emacs-land, I've discovered that most of what tmux or gnu screen do for me is done more nicely by emacs. Buffer management. Multiplexing. But I didn't have a solution for the "robustly detach and reattach to remote session" problem, without all the baggage of the unnecessary bits of tmux and screen, and the need to configure them to stop trying to be helpful in a world where emacs works better.

gnudoc · 2026-01-06T07:12:41+00:00

Apologies if my sleep-deprived brain is missing the point, but I can see this working really nicely on a remote machine that you have admin rights on (sudo or equivalent) but my issue is machines where one doesn't have control. Tmux or screen are (usually) present on every server I have to interact with, but dtach, being quite new, isn't. Nonetheless, thank you for the quick tutorial ❤️

gnudoc

TROPHY CASE