edit:
I’ve updated & expanded the list (finished for today)
Is there a single thing nix does that isnt easier to do with a simple bash script applied over whatever your favorite distro is? Reproducible builds is all that comes to mind
Some things you could do is apply theming in an autistic nix way, configure some services to auto run and setup monitoring and reporting for them.
From my very short experience so far. It really depends on how deep you want to go and what your use case is. If you just want to install applications and use them then it’s not really any different than installing them via terminal on other distros. You just make a list of the app names in a config file and then rebuild and can go about your day.
If I’d wanted to use my laptop with NixOS as my Fedora desktop then I’d be done setting it up 5min after I’ve installed the system. The only time I touch terminal on my Fedora system is when I turn on PC and check for updates because it’s faster than waiting for Software to refresh.
Try
VIMEmacs instead of Nano ;)Can also try helix! I think there is another one called kakoune but I haven’t followed that for a long time
Yeah Helix is cool. I was using it before i switched to Emacs.
I’ve already tried Helix quite a while ago. I went trough the entire bult-in tutorial and then never touched it again because I had no reason to back then. I’d have to start everything from scratch which is why I want to try something else now.
I know enough to know that this is blue vs red situation but not enough to know why. But your comment will likely start a war in this post soon :D
Haha, yeah i’m just goofing around, but at the end of the day, just choose what is most interesting to you. It’s kind of ironic how i got into Emacs anyway, cause before that i chose to use Helix instead of NVIM, cause i didn’t want to bother spending so much time configuring it. Then i tried Guix, which is a distro that you configure in Guile Scheme, so Emacs felt like the perfect fit for that, but in the end i still spent hours configuring my Emacs lol.
Lives have been lost in this war, but you’d be crazy to think that Emacs is not the superior editor. (Half /s)
Actually using the OS and not thinking about it instead of tinkering with it constantly and wondering what to change.
The whole point of me trying NixOS is to tinker with the configs and learning how it works and also learning some of the other skills that go with that. If I just wanted to use the laptop then there is no difference vs my Fedora desktop setup because it’s also GNOME 50 running the same applications.
Try Micro which is apparently based off of MicroEmacs lol
Tailscale is pretty straightforward because they have a config for it baked in, pretty sure it’s just services.tailscale.enable = true. But if you use it with the operator=$USER setting, note that you still need to run tailscale with sudo for your initial login before that works properly
Maybe look into something like impermanence and having root on tmpfs. It’s what made NixOS really “click” for me.
That’s what I like about OpenWrt, every update wipes everything but what’s explicitly configured. And the first update that doesn’t break anything is a rela satisfaction, meaning your whole configuration is contained in a few files listed somewhere
This looks quite interesting but I honestly can’t think of any use case where I would find this useful for me. Also this seems like something best to try in VM first. I’ll keep this one in a bookmark though, may become useful later. Thanks!
impermanence forces you to be intentional with your system, where files are persisted, which is great for: hygiene like feeling like the computer was freshly formatted on each boot; using NixOS as intended by keeping things declarative (in other words, “nixmaxxing”); security also, to a lesser extent tbh, but it’d be protecting against malware nesting at impermanent paths
I get it but for now I find this to be a bit too overly declarative for my taste. For now I’ll focus on things that actually matter for my use case but as I’ve said. I’m bookmarking this to try later in VM.
whatever works for you! no need to do stuff just for the sake of it and its already great youre exploring nix
NixOS synergises very well with terminal command aliases, you should check what commands you frequently use and put those into the config as well.
Good point. I forgot to add that to my list but I did make one alias
reflakeforsudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/nixos-dotfiles#nixos-werecatAfter I had to type this out for IDK how many times (and forgot about CTRL+R) it quickly got annoying :)Now that you mentioned Ctrl+R, also check out program named atuin. It makes the command search a bit more friendly, and you can also optionally sync command history.
IDK why the Atuin config file that got generated is commented out in it’s entirety and nothing works. Right now I can’t be bothered to go trough the entire config and enable things one by one. From what I’ve tried nothing works and IDK why. CTRL+R does not invoke the Atuin search it still invokes the old one. I uncommented everything and still nothing seems to work. The atuin definitely responds to my commands in terminal though. I did run
atuin setupas well.edit: OK, I’ve spent another 30min+ on this and I still can’t understand why it does not work. I’ve adjusted config, even got a custom config from other users and I can’t seem to be able to invoke it in the terminal besides using it’s commands which are the only thing that seem to work. I was able to make an account and login via terminal as well.
edit2: Figured it out! I’ve tried
mcflyand encountered the same issue. Turns out I needed to edit.bashrcwhich is read only even for sudo and even after chmod. So after beating my head against a wall I’ve realized that.bashrcis symlinked to myhome.nixand that’s where I need to place my edits. So nowmcflyruns fine and I’m assuming Atuin would as well since after looking at github I pretty much had to do the same edit for both.
Have you considered using your computer as a computer instead of configuring it?
No. Who does that?
People who don’t run nixos.
But then you’re missing out on a lot of incredible things like a sleep deprivation for instance.
It’s working! Also good point with Codeberg, I forgot that Github is under MS. https://codeberg.org/WereCat/nixos-dotfiles.git
