Okay, hopefully someone here can point out where I am going wrong with setting up my dev shell the way I want. I am currently using direnv and nix-direnv to manage the dev shell, and I found this blog post which shows a way to start and stop MySQL/Mariadb but I am having some weird issues with it.

Currently my flake looks like this:

{
  description = "A basic flake with a shell";
  inputs.nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-unstable";
  inputs.flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";

  outputs = { nixpkgs, flake-utils, ... }@inputs:
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system:
      let
        pkgs = nixpkgs.legacyPackages.${system};
      in
      {
        devShells.default = pkgs.mkShell {
          packages = with pkgs; [
            bashInteractive
            php
          ];

          buildInputs = [ pkgs.mariadb ];

          shellHook = ''
          export MYSQL_BASEDIR=${pkgs.mariadb}
          export MYSQL_HOME=$PWD/.direnv/mysql
          export MYSQL_DATADIR=$MYSQL_HOME/data
          export MYSQL_UNIX_PORT=$MYSQL_HOME/mysql.sock
          export MYSQL_PID_FILE=$MYSQL_HOME/mysql.pid
          alias mysql='mysql -u root'

          if [[ ! -d $MYSQL_HOME ]]; then
            mariadb-install-db --auth-root-authentication-method=normal \
              --datadir="$MYSQL_DATADIR" --basedir="$MYSQL_BASEDIR" \
              --pid-file="$MYSQL_PID_FILE"
          fi

          mariadbd --datadir=$MYSQL_DATADIR --pid-file=$MYSQL_PID_FILE \
            --socket=$MYSQL_UNIX_PORT --tmpdir='/tmp' 2>/dev/null &
          MYSQL_PID=$!
          '';
        };
      });
}

When I run it like this mariadbd starts just fine, but doesn't get backgrounded dispite the & making that shell session useless which is not what I want as I have to spawn a second shell just to do anything.

Even weirder is when I add the finish() function and the call to trap like in the blog post then mariadbd doesn't start (or starts and immedently gets killed).

Okay, that's good to know. I just wanted to make sure that if I had something like MariaDB or Postgres get installed with nix-shell that I wouldn't lose everything thus having to set everything back up next time I start the shell again.

On my Laptop, Arch Linux On my desktop, FreeBSD

I'm currently using Xmonad on my main Arch system, before that was Herbstluftwm. Occasionally I boot up KDE to check on how it's coming along or when i'm feeling nostalgic for what helped get me into Linux many years ago.

It's nice to see that it's finally out of the closed beta, but for me it seems to be lacking in a lot of ways. I make use of identies in BitWarden, have CC data there, and use their CLI app. Hopefully Proton plans to build on Pass to help out compete with other password managers quickly.

Plus side another privacy focused security tool from someone who knows what they are doing is always welcome.

I found out about Lemmy about 3 years ago in a random Reddit thread, and been mostly lurking since then.

Thanks for the tip, I pinged them on Mastodon as well.

I would imagine it also due to a flaw in how Google works. From my understanding, Google incentivizes adding new features, not supporting things. So, unless you're on a team that is working on a core product, you won't get far just maintaining and fixing bugs in a product that is “feature complete”.

The selection of TLDs Cloudflare supports is weird. I checked them out earlier, and they list .dev as “coming soon” even though it was made publicly available in 2019. This makes Cloudflare a non-option for me as I have a handful of .dev domains I would need to transfer somewhere.

Does Namecheap still charge for WHOIS Guard and DNSSEC? That was one of the things I liked about Google Domains, they were free.

I actually think that neochat is more polished than Quaternion, although it also lacks e2ee and video support as of right now, but that is just my opionion.

I don't think it would make it into the base system, but reading through this https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/issues/98 it looks like there is work being done to make appimage work under FreeBSD including some fixes to Linuxulator in 13.0 that should help.

I have seen a lot of song covers using a Hurdy Gurdy, but this guy is down right impressive!

I never used DragonflyBSD, but the lack of https for image downloads and lack of a GPG signature file seems like a huge concern. Even more concerning is if this page is correct it looks like they may also default to http for their repos.

All of these are easily fixable issues, getting a certificate from Let's Encrypt or some other CA if they have the budget for it, creating a detached signature for their installer images before uploading it to their server(s). I don't know any DragonflyBSD devs, so I would say reach out on their mailing list or open a bug in their issue tracker about these.

The plus side is it looks like their ports tree is hosted on GitHub so it's probably safe to say those are fetched in a secure way.

I wouldn't say there is a catch to the FreeBSD Journal, it is done as a free service by the FreeBSD Foundation as a way to help advance FreeBSD awareness and a way to help keep people up-to date with what is going on in FreeBSD world.

While the FreeBSD Journal is now offered for free (this happened early last year) if you do like it, please consider donating to the FreeBSD Foundation which will help the foundation out in many ways.

For more general BSD news there is also BSD Magazine which offers free issues as well as paid subscriptions that includes more issues and workshops and tutorials.

Vermaden's blog is largely focused around BSD news and howtos including his guide to using FreeBSD for a desktop machine. There is also DiscoverBSD https://discoverbsd.com/ which has various things added to it.

While it's a newsletter rather than RSS feed driven there is also https://bsdweekly.com/ that pulls together items posted to DiscoverBSD into a weekly newsletter.

You can set SystemD's journal to use a smaller size if that helps, as by default is can grow to be fairly large. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Journal#Journal_size_limit

Also may be worth manually cleaning old logs from the journal, seeing as your journal is already almost 400 MiB in size https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Journal#Clean_journal_files_manually

If you have not already I also recommend adding a hook to pacman to automatically run paccache to clear out old packages from /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ an example of such a hook can be found here https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1694743#p1694743 I usually keep the last 2 packages around incase something is broken with a newer version and need to rollback.

Even if they go with a new Thinkpad Lenovo (if you trust them) is working towards offering Thinkpads with your choice of either Ubuntu, RHEL, or Fedora preinstalled as well as upstreaming any driver modifications to the Linux kernel which is great if you ever need to reinstall the OS or decide to install a different distro on the machine 1.

I have a P50 myself and love it, even though it's a few years old now it is still running strong. Other than that I have a couple of friends that purchased a Dell that came with Ubuntu preinstalled and they seem like great machines. Due to their bulk I'm usually hesitant to recommend System76 machines unless you know what you are getting into.

I have a Ryzen 7 1700 on my desktop machine and have had no issues with it.

Sadly I do not.