staging: 2025-01-20

[Frontear]

Happy New Years! This has been a late update due to being busy with real life commitments. I hope to slowly return to improving this and my other projects.

Things Done

1. (77b55f7) Bump the flake.lock revisions, no breaking changes that required fixing.
2. (88b1c16) Introduced inxi for system information and diagnostics. The application is wrapped with the majority of important tooling that allows it to work as well as possible. Further may be required and can be checked via inxi --recommends.
3. (ccacbb4) Replace lib.pipe with the actual pipe operator experimental feature. This also brought a massive improvement to the cachix packages expression, which now leverages the flake-parts perSystem rather than iterating over all flake outputs directly.
4. (cfbd396) Bump flake.lock and fix issues related to stdenv changes. Nixpkgs recently bumped GCC from 13 to 14. This broke a lot of packages since the stdenv on linux uses gcc by default. The simplest fix I had at the time was to simply override each package to a stdenv using gcc 13. Some of those pins are still there due to no fix on Nixpkgs and/or upstream. I will look at these more closely next release cycle.
5. (6844093) Cleanup the entirety of the cachix nix expression through usage of a top-level attribute. This attribute, accessible at my.toplevel.cachix = [ ... ], can track all the important derivations, even if they are not directly part of a .package output. This is significantly more flexible but requires manual intervention to ensure nothing is missed. I did a fairly comprehensive sweep over the repository and picked out the things that should be cached, mainly the ones that have local overrides. This can be periodically checked again, perhaps with some automated way in the future.
6. (1c52060) Bump flake.lock again, with no major breakages. If anything, this actually fixed some of the GCC 14 bump changes from the previous upgrade.
7. (4657d3a) Remove Lix and replace it with bleeding-edge Nix. I won't go into much detail especially because I have never actively participated in the Lix community, and due to my busyness, I have not been very active in the Nix community either. Suffice it to say that I do not want to contribute further to dividing the Nix community. I really love what we have and it's extremely disheartening to see everyone tearing each other apart over their differences. Don't get me wrong, I have extremely strong opinions against Eelco's behaviour, DetSys, Anduril, and the rest, but I also believe that there are truly better ways to move forward than just to "fork and disconnect" (to put it extremely tersely).
8. (44c1976) Small random fixes across various nitpicks and modules. The declaration around changing the Nix daemon's TMPDIR was moved into the nix module itself, the recommendation of trying to setup a writeback device for zram was removed since it would functionally have no benefit (still uses the same amount of RAM, just on a difference vdev), and finally I am deciding to use rec for an extremely small systemd-boot module block, simply because I don't think traversing config for it is necessary. I don't really want to have extremely anti-* opinions on the usage of with and rec, like some others, since they are valuable in controlled and small nix expressions.