"Jovian Applet"

[samueldr]

These are initial notes for a "Jovian Applet" thing.

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Goals

Helping a user when things go wrong.

Main thing here I have in mind is to allow selecting which session to start.

The idea would be to:

• Detect a specific (lizard mode assumed) key is being held
• Switch to the applet
• The applet would allow selecting which session to start ("plasma" or "steam")

We can cheat a lot for checking the key, e.g. try the following:

 $ nix-shell -p evtest
 $ sleep 1; for dev in /dev/input/event*; do sudo evtest --query "$dev" EV_KEY KEY_LEFTSHIFT || echo $?; done

By detecting any of the input devices returning 10 we can trivially enough flag the applet up.

We could even have it work to directly switch to the desktop session in the mean-time!

Do additional maintenance tasks

There are some administrative tasks with Nix things that get awkward to do on a portable device. Maybe garbage collection aimed at cleaning up the ESP for boot related issues?

It would be nice to allow a nixos-rebuild --upgrade to happen, but I'm not sure if there's any universal mechanism that can be used these days, with the fragmentation there is around inputs.

In-steam stuff

The same "framework" should be re-used within the steam app to add some useful features:

• Ejecting external storage properly
• Creating a new library on external storage
• Formatting external storage