NixOS overlay for kwin-lowlatency

This repository has been archived, as Plasma 5.21 has been merged to Nixpkgs master and there is (at the time of writing) no kwin-lowlatency 5.21 yet. Also, the latency improvements to KWin in 5.21 are good enough that I personally do not have much of a reason to use kwin-lowlatency anymore.

I think I am the only person who is using this overlay, but if you are using it and this is a problem for you, please let me know.

This is an overlay for NixOS that replaces the kwin package with @tildearrow's kwin-lowlatency.

Using the overlay

At the moment, only the nixos-unstable and nixos-unstable-small channels are supported.

Add the following to your configuration.nix:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  nixpkgs.overlays = [
    (import (builtins.fetchTarball {
      url = "https://github.com/InternetUnexplorer/kwin-lowlatency-overlay/archive/nixos-unstable.tar.gz";
    }))
  ];
}

Using the binary cache

You will probably want to use the binary cache. Follow the instructions here to set it up.

How the binary cache works

I've set up a GCE instance that checks the status of the nixos-unstable and nixos-unstable-small channels roughly every two minutes. If any of the channels have been updated then it triggers the build workflow which builds the package and pushes it to the binary cache.

The script used to watch the channels is available here and the timer/service units and dispatch script are available here.

Because the build runs after the channel has updated, there is a small chance that the package won't be built yet when you update your system. In that case, you can either let it be built locally or wait 20 minutes or so until it's ready, I guess. Feel free to sword-fight on office chairs with your friend, go outside, or whatever you normally do when something is compiling.

Feedback

If the overlay or the binary cache stops working, or if you have suggestions for how to improve them, or anything else really, please open an issue.