I recently reinstalled my NixOS laptop. I just installed the distribution, added my SSH keys, cloned a repository, made a handful of symlinks, and then told Nix

I recently reinstalled my NixOS laptop. I just installed the distribution, added my SSH keys, cloned a repository, made a handful of symlinks, and then told NixOS to set everything up. It's actually a collaborative repository, so that both of us in our company can improve the computer configuration, install new tools or language runtimes, etc etc. The shared configuration has stuff like: our user accounts and public SSH keys; local mailer setup; firewall; conf for X/bash/emacs/ratpoison/tmux; list of installed packages (including Chromium, mplayer, nethack, etc); fonts and keymaps; various services (nssmdns, atd, redis, ipfs, tor, docker, ssh agent, etc); some cron jobs; a few custom package definitions; and some other stuff. In Emacs, I use "use-package" for all external package requirements so that when I start the editor it installs all missing packages from ELPA/MELPA. Aside from dealing with the binary WiFi blob this Dell computer demands, reinstalling was a pleasure.