Nerves keeps doing shit

I don't necessarily share Nerves news here. I have the official Nerves Newsletter for that. But there is alot of technically interesting stuff floating around.

mobius
I've helped refresh this library recently and I think I might be the primary maintainer now. I need to cut a release with some of the stuff added recently, just needs more time on the grill.

On-device metrics is the name of the game. Economical, flexible and technically crunchy. Circular buffers, DDSketch histograms. Recently done a bunch of work to reduce memory footprint, add those histograms and I'm experimenting on a separate library for on-device self-diagnosis.

For long-running servers this could also be perfectly reasonable to run.

nbpr
This is a wild and wonderful concept by James Harton on an alternate way to get custom packages into Nerves projects from buildroot without incurring the pain of a custom system build. Still early but more people should try it and help iron out issues.

This would let you grab container support, ffmpeg or any old shared library as a hex dependency rather than make a custom system.

Next up for consideration is .. kernel stuff.

Nerves Hub
Always lots of stuff happening. Josh has been cranking away at the design and light mode for a bit along with some very exciting work on CLI tools. More to announce there later.

Web kiosk example
This is getting a visual glow-up that I've been poking at but Frank has put in recent work to get it into way better shape. If you need a web kiosk, Nerves is a very good turnkey option right now.

Nerves verity & secure boot
No repo for this yet. Let's just say this is getting increasingly tooled up and I hope we can release some proper stuff soon. I'm already able to vastly simplify the stuff I've set up for my client.

Calls to action

Erlang Ecosystem Registry

Cheapest way to support the ecosystem. It free. If your company uses the BEAM, Erlang, Elixir or Gleam. Sign em up

Goatmire Tickets >50% tickets gone

Ticket sales have picked up as we approach and also as we announce speakers. Please make sure you acquire tickets if you want to attend.

Attend the remote Nerves Meetup EU

I've generally not been big on virtual events. I really like what we have going with our crew of 20-40 Elixir and Nerves folks who pop in for our Nerves Meetups.

The presentation video archive is full of bangers. But watching the vods means you miss the great hanging out at the end.

Events

28 Sep - 4 Oct - Goatmire Elixir
I'm organizing it.
21-22 Oct - Code BEAM Europe
Simply attending it. Look forward to that.
4-6 Nov - Oredev
Speaking

A real GUI

A GUI and OS that makes me feel respected.

I had a Linux meltdown recently. I had a very messy Pop_OS! install that got jammed up doing a system upgrade (wow that tooling is dumb as two bricks). And then when I was doing recovery mode I got a bit trigger happy on what I thought was a Repair tool but which was Refresh Install, meaning, murder everything except /home. So I had an opportunity and strong passion towards picking a new distro.

I considered the new cool immutable distros and whatnot but I needed to get back to work and didn't want to shift my paradigms. Nix can wait.

Aside from some cursed interactions between my Pop_OS's old GNOME -> Regolith -> GNOME -> KDE journey of desktop environments I really liked KDE on my previous machine. I was excited by the prospect of the clean install being less mucked up and cursed.

So I grabbed Kubuntu. The devil I know (Ubuntu) and a desktop I generally agree with (KDE).

Not trying to be that particular guy in terms of shitting on modern GNOME but I really can't get into whatever they've been up to beyond GNOME 2.x. It is cool in a bunch of ways but .. it just never lands for me.

KDE on the other hand. They've done Plasma and a bunch of versions of KDE. But there hasn't been a paradigm shift. It is still a Windows 95-ish experience albeit in modern style. And anything that would be hidden under "Advanced" or two menus in are immediately available to you in KDE. You can run with defaults or you can tweak to your heart's content.

The design concepts of the last few decades have certainly been about making a frictionless default experience and settings and control knobs have been considered bad design. KDE has never bought into this. They've certainly tweaked and changed things but the fundamental flexiblity, configurability and management of the combinatorial explosion inherent to that seems unwavering.

Anytime I don't like how a thing in the OS looks, feels, works there are knobs to change it. In detail, with mostly sane options. I've reworked the window management to my own preferred tiling key bindings. KWin does that fine.

And the computer hasn't tried to sell me anything.

It is sad that this is a phenomenal experience today. All the OS:es used to be some level of this and then they started removing control and making every damn app a snowflake with custom UI. And in Windows' case adding new generations of not quite Control Panel. System Settings in KDE is way better than MacOS or Windows. And if I find the window corners too round, you bet I can change it.

The default suite of apps use common design and UI elements. So to whatever extent you can stick to the default apps you get a consistent experience. Of course Slack and Discord won't play that way..

I love that people are still just building UI that takes advantage of the malleability of software. Thanks to all who do.

Glad midsommar, thanks for reading.