• 0 Posts
  • 196 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle




  • If you want punishment go for NixOS!

    • Fundamental philosophy changes over its lifetime.
    • No idea (when starting) which documentation or patterns go with which version.

    But once it clicks you have a fully declarative setup**. I edit a file, activate, commit to git. On another system, pull, activate.

    ** The config system is expansive but not exhaustive. I still have to login to Slack, pick my theme, etc. My VPN on the other hand is just ready credentials and all.

    I never have to remember the 100 little tweaks I made, every tweak is in git. Noise canceling pipewire filter, what software I had installed, service configurations, secret management, disk partitions, all portable between different systems.

    A lighter introduction is probably home manager, works in any Linux system or macOS. Manages your home directory as the name implies.

    You can also go lighter with a repo flake.nix and a devShell. Its like a generic virtual environment. Auto activate with direnv. A step up from a devShell would be https://devenv.sh/ which tracks more like home manager with configurable modules. A devShell is really a bash script with these programs available from Nix.













  • NixOS. Started with Yellow Dog Linux in 1998.

    I don’t do everything through nix’s derivation system.

    Many of my configs are just an outOfStoreSymlink to my configs in the same dotfiles repos. I don’t need every change wrapped in a derivation. Neovim is probably the largest. A few node projects for automations I’m fine using pnpm to manage. Nix still places everything but I can tweek those configs and commit in the same repo without a full blown activation.