I have a Mac Book Pro that is dormant at the moment. I retired it because it became slow and unreliable. It’s a 2016 Mac Book Pro. This was never a great machine. I bought it cheaply because my good machine was stolen. I replaced the battery a few years ago and I was going to do the same, until I saw that it was retired by Apple. Without updates I didn’t see much point in paying 200 CHF for a battery for a machine that will run Linux when I can get a machine for that price.
Yesterday I experimented with NixOS and Debian. I managed to install NixOS on the Pi4 and I managed to implement several changes to the configuration.nix file before the Pi started to overheat and become much slower. At this point I tried to run Debian and that worked.
At first Debian was running in command line mode so I took the time to install the KDE desktop and that’s when I ran into the same limitation of the Pi4.
During the weekend it was warm and beautiful. It was so warm and beautiful that my bag got to 40+ degrees centigrade, with an average of over 30°c. Today as I drove to the shops for food I noticed that the snow line was even lower.
Yesterday it was on the top of the Jura, around La Dole, and today it’s down two thirds of the mountain. It’s cold enough to feel cold when walking.
For a few weeks I have tried to install NixOS on a raspberry Pi without much success. I have finally managed to get NixOS to work with a GUI/Desktop environment. I kept getting stuck at the command prompt but in the end I found a blog post that helped me.
What I Struggled With The first thing I struggled with was finding a version of NixOS that played nicely with Pi’s processor.
While walking and listening to podcasts I kept hearing about NixOS and how good it is for instantiating environments over and over again. What I didn’t hear about, so much, is that there is a steep learning curve, to get started with.
Installing the OS is easy. Download NixOS, flash it to a USB stick, reboot a computer onto the OS on that USB stick and begin installation of the OS.