Linux

I have owned the Affinity V2 Universal License for a while, and I still had the complete Windows installations for Photo 2, Designer 2, and Publisher 2 on one of the Windows drive. They were surprisingly portable on Windows. I had previously reinstalled Windows 11, opened the applications from their old location, entered my license details, and moved on using them. Linux was the more interesting question. Could I run Affinity Photo 2 properly on NixOS without turning the machine into a science project of Wine-prefix six months later? ...

I wanted to use the ChatGPT/Codex desktop application natively, which worked on NixOS with one command: NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1 nix run --impure github:numtide/llm-agents.nix#chatgptThat was temporary testing, but it was not how I wanted to keep it. My workstation is configured declaratively. If an application becomes part of my normal workflow, I want to put it in the NixOS configuration - not hidden inside terminal history as a command, which would be difficult to remember later on. ...

The Elgato Wave:3 works surprisingly well on Linux as a normal USB microphone. The problem is that the microphone is only half of what makes the Wave setup useful on Windows. The other half is the Wave Link app. On Windows, Elgato gives you microphone processing, VST effects, routing, noise reduction, and separate virtual devices. On Linux, you can plug the Wave:3 in and record from it, but there is no official Wave Link application waiting for you, nor will there be any. ...

The install itself was not the hard part. The hard part was getting Fedora Plasma 44 to behave like a normal desktop after the install, with Secure Boot still on and NVIDIA actually loading instead of sulking at boot. This is the cleaned-up version of what I ended up doing. I am keeping the install part short and the Secure Boot plus NVIDIA part upfront, because that was the part that consumed the time. ...

The UPS looked ordinary right up until NUT refused to see it the way I expected. These Prolink 650VA and 850VA units do not behave like the USB HID UPS gear many people assume they are. Both units showed up as 0665:5161 USB-to-serial devices, and the shortest working path was to use nutdrv_qx, not usbhid-ups. This post is the cleaned-up version of the setup I ended up with across two Linux hosts: ...