Here's an update on my custom modified mini-pc project which I've renamed as NixOStr (nicks-oh-ster)... IDK, LOL... if you can think of something better, please comment.  I learned all kinds of new things on this project!  For instance, the little "drive bay" is a barebones circuit board for a compact flash express type B card reader.  It has a flat ribbon cable that connects the card reader part to the nvme card adapter part.  Because of the way i had to route the cable in the mini-pc case, the pin leads wouldn't flip over to match the orientation of the card reader which i attached to accomodate a "label up" insertion for the CFX card.  I read the fine print on the ribbon cable, did a little research on "AWM 20624" and discovered the terminology of "Flexible Flat Cables" or "FFC" for short.  

	Turns out, there's 2 types!  Type "A" FFC has the pins on each end of the cable facing to the same face/side of the cable.  This "A" type FFC cable is what the card reader adapter shipped with.  Type "B" FFC has one side of the cable to expose the pinouts to the opposite face of the cable which is useful for 180 degree (d) configurations where the card or board has to face the opposite way.  Because i only had the "A" type FFC cable, in my haste, I previously had done some... shall we say... "folding" to force this cable rotation to happen so that I could mount the little card reader, right side up, with rivets to the old SATA SSD drive mount inside the mini-pc.  I think this folding may be contributing to slower than expected data transfer speed, but I ordered the type "B" cables to replace my first type "A" FFC cable that came with the card reader.   

	After quite a bit of Linux distro hopping, I think i finally settled on NixOS as my host operating system for its pluripotent potentialities of "Here, try my config file to get up and running with your own copy of Amethyst & Nostr!"

	NixOS ships with KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment, which is something to behold with animated wallpapers and window transparency/opacity... whichever it's called...  It even has some basic tiling window manager functionality.  I was really going for Sway or Hyprland to get that automatically organized tiling window manager experience and per monitor taskbar/app launching, but I could never get Waydroid to cooperate ALL the way on my previous distro experiments.

	After trying Manjaro Sway, then NWG Hyprland/Sway, then Garuda Sway and finally Garuda Hyprland, I just couldn't get the trifecta of Waydroid, Wayland and Tiling Window Managers (TWMs)... Then I discovered that KDE Plasma 6 has an add-in called Polonium for half-way decent window tiling.  I found my compromise!  

	During my distro hopping, I kept seeing Chris Titus Tech in the YouTube thumbnails and him talking about something called NixOS.  I had seen it before, but never tried it.  It seemed complicated.  I was right and wrong.  It's different, but I wouldn't say so complicated that it's unapproachable.  It's taken about 2 weeks to find the OS for my newly modified mini-pc.  The new ISO that they've offered, made the transition possible for me.  It even seems to have the Polonium TWM functionality already baked into KDE Plasma... but no one can have everything.  😩😞

	There are sacrifices to get the trifecta of Amethyst & Waydroid running per Wayland with TWM, so I can't get cool software like the Beyond All Reason game, the OpenKJ karaoke, the OpenLP projection  or many other linux software that just seem to "just work" on other Linux distros... BUT i really like NixOS!  I like it so much, I think I might try to install it on my other machines and see if the configuration(dot)nix file really can replicate my install on other machines... Hopefully, I will learn how to install all the software that doesn't seem to be in the Nix Packages repository.  Should be interesting to see how declaritive NixOS is.
"I do declare!" 😁

BTW- hashtags mean "don't pay attention to these following keywords" in NixOS.  Go figure?


#NixOStr      #FKA      #Swapstr

#Linux      #NixOS      #DeclarativeBuildsAndDeployments

#Screenshot      #Custom      #PC

#GrowNostr

https://image.nostr.build/10d926cd6fa2f90341d428773c31d01a4a75ef83d4048bef719584da479b13f1.jpg