2021 Year in Review

on 2022-02-23 in year-in-review

Last year, I decided to move away from using proprietary software in favor of using free, libre, and open-source software. I will share the reasons in a future post. What entailed that decision is summarized in this one.

I divided the post into 4 parts to help understand the timeline better.

First Quarter ¶

IDE ¶

I write code almost every day and I was quite good with JetBrains IDEs. It was the single most important software that I couldn’t live without. I knew that moving away from it will have significant impact on my productivity, but I like to tackle the toughest problem first, so I decided to replace it with emacs first.

I continued using my rusty new ¹ MacBook Air 2017, with emacs for about three months. I was becoming good at using emacs. But if you’ve used emacs, you’d know that One does not simply use emacs just to edit code. I started replacing other software with what was built into emacs.

Software forge ¶

After acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft, I lost interest in hosting my projects there. I already had an account on GitLab but their reverse proxy won’t allow me to use it via icecat. I created an account on sourcehut to host my projects. But I was actively comparing various software forges to see whether their model of business aligns with what I was looking for.

Second Quarter ¶

Email client ¶

I had been using GPGTools with Apple Mail for about two years then. It was a perfect setup for me to be able to communicate with people privately over email. I replaced it with notmuch. Notmuch introduced a different kind of email experience, which grew on me. I just had purchased a copy of GPG Mail Support Plan before moving to notmuch. I asked the developers if I could get a refund and they generously processed the refund. I recommend GPGTools to Apple Mail users.

Password manager ¶

I bought a Yubikey and replaced Apple Keychain with pass. I also replaced Authy with pass-otp. The only secure hardware key available in India at that time was Yubikey. This made me realize that I won’t be able to move to free software completely. I decided to make compromise with 3 categories of software.

Firmware
Drivers
Games (Entertainment)

Media player ¶

EMMS and MPV replaced QuickTime Player and Apple Music.

Everything else ¶

Org Mode replaced Notes, Calendar, Todos, Stopwatch, Calculator, and Alarm. It’s one of the best software I’ve used.

Third Quarter ¶

Operating System ¶

Everything that had ties to Apple was replaced by emacs. I brought home my 8 year old HP laptop, to replace MacOS with GNU+Linux. I was quite inspired by Richard Stallman at that time (and I still am), so I decided to run a completely free operating system called GNU Guix on my laptop. I had to buy AR9271 to get wireless internet connection. Wired connection worked just fine though.

There were some software that I wanted to use, that weren’t there in official guix channel ². I contributed some of them upstream with the help of guix community. #guix on irc.libera.chat is welcoming and friendly. I learned how the patches are submitted via mailing lists while contributing to guix. Here are the patches I submitted to guix over the last year:

sourcehut ¶

After assessing alternatives for several months, I decided to stay with sourcehut and make it better by contributing to it. I also started paying for it to support the project financially.

builds.sr.ht-guix ¶

sourcehut lacked support of GNU Guix as a build image for its CI service. I created a project builds.sr.ht-guix and got it upstream. I have been maintaining it since then. I authored a mini cookbook explaining how guix can be used with builds.sr.ht. The project also got featured on sourcehut some time ago.

Last Quarter ¶

builds.sr.ht-minix ¶

I was looking into various non-mainstream operating systems and trying to figure out a way to make development using them more accessible with sourcehut. I started creating a CI image for Minix 3 in builds.sr.ht-minix. Minix, at the stage of development at that time, lacked support of automated build image creation on GNU+Linux. To work around this problem, I wrote an expect script. Which understandably was turned down by the upstream as it was not really maintainable for long term.

I tried implementing the same with NetBSD but it too had no support for minix file system in its kernel. Unfortunately, I had to archive my project as the Minix 3 project was dormant for 4 years and the amount of time required to implement it would outweigh the benefits of a CI image. While working on this project I interacted with people on #minix and #netbsd on irc.libera.chat. They were friendly and helpful.

builds.sr.ht ¶

I implemented support for accepting build job note as querystring parameter because I wanted to provide links to predefined build jobs along with example build manifests in guix cookbook.

builds.sr.ht-guix ¶

GNU Guix had some network issues during this time. Guix CI image is built nightly, so it had more cases of failure. I made several changes to the CI image builder that fixed these problems.

Alpine linux ¶

Guix is one of the advanced GNU+Linux distros. It has many features but they do come at a cost, which I won’t go into in this post. After exploring and using GNU Guix, I wanted to explore a minimal distro that does the job. I decided to try Alpine Linux. Alpine too lacked some packages that I wanted to use. My experience with packaging software for guix helped me. Here are the packages I contributed upstream last year:

Here is a link to all packages that I’m maintaining.

Summary ¶

I don’t use a smartphone. I use a feature phone (Nokia 215) which is turned off almost all the time. If I were to use a smartphone, I’d have used postmarketOS.

I like to self-host. This post does not include that journey. I’ll publish another detailed post about it in future.

I started accepting one time and recurring donations. I was relying on donations for a while until the RBI announced guidelines that stopped all my recurring donations. I don’t (can’t) rely on donations anymore. ³

Overall, I think this transition was successful. I don’t depend on proprietary software that might limit my ability to compute in a substantial way.

Since I was (and still am) unemployed last year, I had (and still have) the luxury of being able to work on whatever I wish to, full-time. I can’t thank my wife enough for encouraging me to do what I do and financially supporting me.

A story for another time. ↩︎
A guix channel is a repository of definitions of software packages. One can download pre-built bit-to-bit identical binaries from the CI or can modify, build, and use the software locally. ↩︎
Update 2022-09-01: I no longer accept donations. ↩︎

I welcome your feedback or constructive criticism to contact@dhruvin.dev.