Windows 10 Daily Driven
A few faithful applications to bridge the UX failings 🗔, Hyper-V running a small NixOS virtual machine, Windows terminal in Quake mode... Yea, it feels pretty good.
A little over a month ago my Lemur Pro laptop became my partners daily driver and Windows 10 was installed 😮. Due to the layout of our new house I find myself working far away from the server room and my now desktop computer that is part of that space. So I pickup the Lemur when I am doing all the basic homelab admin work, service deployment on the infrastructure, management of cloud services.
How to get a workflow
Try using Windows exactly how you'd use your desktop Linux. Shortcuts to open terminals, window management, package install?... Is that even possible?
I have been pleasantly surprised almost duplicating my XFCE-4 / i3 setup. Albeit there has been more mouse work until I learn all the Windows default keybindings and become a Windows UI power user.
Shared Space
What if you went back to the days of the family computer that has one user account that everyone shares. Could you get your work done?
This is the question I wanted to answer.
For the past year or so I've been on the immutability train and Nix is taking over all the systems around me.
As of late I am really interested in the concept of wipe on reboot systems. Every time your computer restarts it wipes the OS, boots to an up to date clean OS, and it is your responsibility to build it in such a way that no critical application data is stored on disk, every restart your system can restore services, load application data, .and continue as if it hadn't been wiped moments ago.
... Wait, did you just say your computer wipes itself every system restart? Mhm😸 Linux is so wonderful haha But the idea holds in my opinion and is the model I want to reach one day. For now baby steps.
The Rundown
Terminal
Really the application I use the most and thank gawd Microsoft made a really good one with all that 💸💸💸 kicking around.
Windows Terminal
Omg, omg, omg.. It has Quake mode 😻
Pssssssst! wt.exe -w_quake 😏 and all your problems go away. Bind that to say, CTRL + ALT + t feels good right? F11 full screen, Super + " ` " (backtick) for hide / show.
I couldn't be happier.
VS Code
Need I say more? Integration of VS Code made by the people who make the OS is great. Just a few extensions and BAM! Two things I spend most my time in are sorted.
Web Browser
I've got 99 problems and Windows better not be one of them ** shakes fist ** I find keeping installed applications way down helps tremendously. Microsoft gives you Edge... I know its just built on top Chromium with the same engine, I still kinda hate it. My partner uses Chrome, so lets learn to live with Chrome.
Site Search Shortcuts
This Chrome feature made it possible for me to cohabit the same browser as a Google Search default"er". I'm more of a DuckDuckGo person solely for the !bangs feature. Now in Google Chrome's search bar although powered by Google Search I will just preface any search query with the letter d, space, and anything that follows is using DuckDuckGo. So great! what really tipped the scale is bangs work as if the bar was ddg on default. Can I get a little d vintage skateboard gear !ebca (Search Ebay.ca for vintage skateboard gear). Pretty nifty.
Where do you get the real work done though?
Okay truth at some point I actually need to get onto systems in the lab, get onto my cloud instances, do the grunt work that keeps my services tower afloat. You trusting your your whole SSH keyring on this shit?
I don't get down with PowerShell and I am crippled on the Windows command line. So besides some workflow fluff, nice nested "Home" style directory structure withing the root of the ${USERS} folder to keep myself in the corner of the Windows box... It's all back to Linux haha
Hyper-V
Well I literally have nothing bad to say about Hyper-V Manager. It was easier to create a bridged lan interface than with Virt Manager. I used the wizard to create a 25G disk, slapped NixOS on that, boots in seconds when I need it.
This is my jump host where I leave the Windows environment and get real work done. I did look at WSL and have played with the versions over the years including their newer builds which are incredible how stable and Linux functional it is. Almost completely transparent which system you are administering. For me when it came down to it I do my compute and work on the lab so get me outa here.
I setup a password protected keypair for the NixOS system, deployed only on the critical systems, and decided from there I'd use my restricted backup chain network to hop around once off the NixOS VM running on Hyper-V. This way if anything happens to the Windows OS or Microsoft decides one day all created systems memory managed by their operating system should have a master key for their corporate use, the access to my infrastructure is minimized.
In the end
Well all things considered Windows 10 not so horrible to get some work done. I look forward to trying out containers on the platform and maybe getting the Nix language managing Windows Package Manager 1.0. . .
Could you imagine! A Windows OS, wiped on reboot, started from a clean golden image, with enforced group policies, fresh packages, some cleaning scripts already streamlined to clean menu and feature bloat... All declared from some .nix files. I honestly feel like it's almost there. Maybe place all this behind Wireguard and I could than run this for multiple systems over distance.