Why I game on NixOS

Why I game on NixOS

I booted up Helldivers 2 one night, eager to defend managed democracy with friends. When the game launched on my NixOS desktop, the framerate had tanked: I was getting 20–30 FPS before even launching a mission. I’d updated my machine earlier that day, so I asked my friends to give me a minute while I rebooted into the previous system generation.

Back at the desktop, I launched Helldivers 2 again and it was smooth as butter. After saying goodnight to my friends, I tracked the problem down to a Mesa version bump in the last batch of updates. The update had broken the game, but rolling back meant I didn’t have to fix it before we could play.

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Watching my cats from anywhere with Tailscale

I have a couple of cameras around the house to keep an eye on the cats when I’m away. The ones I use are Reolink E1 Zoom cameras. They work entirely offline, no cloud account required, no mandatory app sign-in, just a camera on the local network. The limitation is obvious once you leave the house. If the camera is only reachable on 192.168.0.x, remote access usually means either handing that job to Reolink’s relay service or exposing something on your own network. I wanted neither.

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Proton Pass CLI: switching to the Secret Service keyring

In my previous post I documented the migration from 1Password to Proton Pass and landed on a workaround for the main annoyance: pass-cli stores its local encryption key in the Linux kernel keyring, which is wiped on every reboot, forcing a manual pass-cli login before SSH keys could be loaded each morning.

Fortunately, Proton has now merged a change that makes this unnecessary and allows for a setup much closer to that of 1Password.

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Migrating from 1Password to Proton Pass on NixOS

With a recent change to pricing for 1Password I’ve finally made the decision to migrate over to Proton Pass. It’s already included in my Proton Duo subscription and Proton Pass has made strides with its features since launch.

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Debugging WirePlumber volume reset on boot

Recently I noticed that my volume was at 100% after rebooting my desktop NixOS machine. My audio setup runs through a Schiit Fulla DAC over USB, nothing exotic, just a clean external DAC for headphones. I could turn the volume down during a session and it would stay put, but the next reboot it was back at full blast. It wasn’t anything big but it was annoying enough to actually dig into.

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A sway misclick

On a Sunday morning I sat down to start playing a Steam game via Proton on my Framework 13 laptop. Upon booting into the game I noticed that the cursor tracked perfectly, moving exactly where I expected it to, but clicks never registered. I could hover over a button in the game, click, and nothing would happen.

I hadn’t used the laptop for gaming in a long while, the Steam Deck had mostly taken over that role, but I had a hankering for a more mouse-driven game and the Framework 13 has plenty of power for these cases.

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