2026 September Summaries

Tuesday, 15th September 2026

• Continued testing from yesterday - added ChatGPT/Codex native app in nixos. This is a bit more refined work than usual as the Codex native app isn’t directly available to use.

Monday, 14th September 2026

• This was a busy day - moving from nixos Plasma/KDE SDDM to Niri with Dank Material Shell. Not a simple task, there were many details including critical movement like keystore changes from KWallet to gnome-key-store.
• Compositor: Niri, with repository-owned KDL under app-configs/niri/ split into display, input, layout, keybinding, animation, autostart, rule, and miscellaneous fragments.
• Shell: DMS, managed as a Niri-scoped user service rather than a global autostart process.
• Login: DMS Greeter through greetd, using a minimal greeter-only Niri configuration that does not import private user shell state.
• Credentials: GNOME Keyring is now the sole Secret Service and unlocks through greetd PAM. KWallet packages and backup data remain temporarily for rollback, but no KWallet daemon is active.
• Theming: DMS/Matugen generates colors for DMS, GTK, qt6ct, Ghostty, VSCode, the cursor, and Niri. Generated palettes remain mutable output rather than committed source.
• Applications: Nautilus, Loupe, Papers, File Roller, GNOME Text Editor, Celluloid, Ghostty, and Satty replaced KDE-first tools. Krusader, VLC, Alacritty, and Tabby kept intentionally.
• Audio: PipeWire/WirePlumber exposes Elgato Wave:3 Mono as the default input; EasyEffects Source feeds OBS and Handy. A short WirePlumber startup delay avoids the race observed during the greeter handoff.

Checklist:

Run after default changes, theming changes, Plasma/KDE apps removal, and residual cleanup:

• Cold boot reaches the selected greeter and Niri login succeeds
• DMS starts once and dms doctor has no unexpected findings
• Both displays have correct mode, scale, position, and acceleration
• Lock/unlock and repeated suspend/resume work
• PipeWire, EasyEffects, Wave:3 processing, and OBS audio work
• OBS capture and Vivaldi screen/tab sharing work
• Vivaldi sessions and Bitwarden survive reboot
• Secret Service has the expected owner
• The selected wallet unlocks automatically through the active greeter PAM stack
• StreamController and Handy work after login
• Network profiles and Bluetooth reconnect normally
• USB storage, phone mounting, SMB, trash, and thumbnails work
• Browser file dialogs and xdg-open use intended applications
• Clipboard content survives source-application exit
• Terminal and screenshot workflows cover the accepted feature set
• Tabby SSH profiles and authentication still work and have verified backup coverage
• Krusader working as expected
• Printing and disk-management workflows work if those tools changed

The final checklist was done on 2026-09-14. A manual Backrest run after the GNOME Keyring, qt6ct, and DMS/Niri path additions are completed.

Sunday, 13th September 2026

• The last few days were some crazy experiment days with NixOS and I was also catching up with my reading (yes, normal hard cover books).
• The experiments in nixos involving Niri + Noctalia, Hyprland, and Niri+DankMaterialShell. And I think finally I have settled with Niri+DMS for stability and speed. I still have a backup of SDDM - Plasma 6/KDE.
• While I was trying out the Quartz 5 lightbox plugin to make this image open in a lightbox, it turns out that plugin had some SPA navigation bug that threw console errors in subsequent pages of Quartz 5. So I forked and fixed it for now.
• Simple issue but I am not sure how quartz 5 missed it. The images shown in mobile have a critical problem of aspect ratio just because one line is missing in the CSS. Just this fix article img { height: auto; } - in mobile view if this is not present, it will squish the image from the side due to the narrow viewport.

Wednesday, 9th September 2026

• Finally, the Wave 3 microphone has an effects chain on nixos. I have missed the Wave 3 app on Windows but was able to make a simpler workaround using Easy Effects.

flowchart TB
    A["🎙️ Elgato Wave:3"]
    B["🔊 PipeWire"]
    C["🧭 WirePlumber"]
    D["🎛️ EasyEffects"]

    A --> B --> C --> D

    D --> E["✨ Processing Chain<br/>High-pass filter<br/>Noise reduction<br/>Equalizer<br/>Compressor<br/>De-esser<br/>Limiter"]

    E --> F["🎤 EasyEffects Source"]

    F --> G["🎥 OBS"]
    F --> H["🌐 Browser"]
    F --> I["🖥️ +Others"]

Sunday, 6th September 2026

• Experiments started with CatchyOS. It has its own boot, EFI, and SSD drive. Currently, I have moved out of Fedora and am using nixos as stable, with a backup of CatchyOS.
• I was surprised that CatchyOS actually installed with Nvidia drivers and other components with NO conflicts or errors. We will see how this goes.
• I am using Niri as the window manager in CatchyOS.
• Let me show off the boot menu then.

Friday, 4th September 2026

• It took me a little bit of time but finally managed to make Tailscale MagicDNS work with AdGuard Local DNS in nixos.

Thursday, 3rd September 2026

• I have done a full test on email clients on nixos and finally after checking Thunderbird, KMail, Aerion, Postcard and Bluemail. Ultimlately, I went for Betterbird, which is a fork of Thunderbird but much more cleaner approach.
• I have experimented with dynamic Astro-based site generations for multiple business types, and so far they are ok and can be implemented for businesses with logically much more affordable prices, cheaper hosting, better security overhead and maintenance schedules. In short, these can run without issues for many years.

Wednesday, 2nd September 2026

• Planning to modularize the nixos packages and probably conditional switches so some of the items can be switched of for certain builds.

Tuesday, 1st September 2026

• New NixOS Grub menu with Windows 11 bootloader integration. It is also possible to restore NixOS revisions from the said menu.
• Completed the pending to-do - which is proper JSON-LD data for RuhaniRabin.com. Finally it was done, for all post types, and single pages.

2026 - 08 - Updates