3 ms·

I feel this. I've attempted a few times to try NixOS, and I can't seem to quite grok it for my use case. I sort of wish I could sit someone down and ask "here

I feel this. I've attempted a few times to try NixOS, and I can't seem to quite grok it for my use case. I sort of wish I could sit someone down and ask "here's what I'm doing now in rpm/deb land across all of these devices (x86, mobile, ARM). How do I do this in Nix in a sustainable way?"

zamalek 4y ago
Thinking about it like rpm/deb is where you're getting hung up. Think of it more along the lines of npm, but for your OS (or just your profile in the case of nixpkgs+home-manager). At the most trivial level, you can set up some packages to install [1][2]. You'll generally come out ahead of classical package managers if you do that and nothing else. Nix also acknowledges the configuration issue. Think of this like copying some config files using a dockerfile. You can either use literals[3], or use the nix language to generate the config [4] (provided that someone has created the required projection from nix to config). What this ends up becoming is a single git repo with your entire system setup. My repo gets a bit fancier: I have my home desktop (currently Nixos, but it distrohops a lot), my personal laptop running Ubuntu+intune+nixpkgs for work, and then my work Mac machine (which I am aiming to get rid of). The single repo contains nix configs for all 3, and shares config where appropriate. I really need to write a blog post about Nix in 2023. The main issue with getting started right now is that the installer requires some convincing to use flakes (not to mention that flakes are disabled by default), and you really should be using flakes. [1]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/system/jono-desktop.nix#L153 https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/system/jono-d... [2]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.nix#L27 https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.... [3]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.nix#L138 https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.... [4]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/dconf.nix https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/dconf.ni...

zamalek 4y ago

Thinking about it like rpm/deb is where you're getting hung up. Think of it more along the lines of npm, but for your OS (or just your profile in the case of nixpkgs+home-manager). At the most trivial level, you can set up some packages to install [1][2]. You'll generally come out ahead of classical package managers if you do that and nothing else. Nix also acknowledges the configuration issue. Think of this like copying some config files using a dockerfile. You can either use literals[3], or use the nix language to generate the config [4] (provided that someone has created the required projection from nix to config). What this ends up becoming is a single git repo with your entire system setup. My repo gets a bit fancier: I have my home desktop (currently Nixos, but it distrohops a lot), my personal laptop running Ubuntu+intune+nixpkgs for work, and then my work Mac machine (which I am aiming to get rid of). The single repo contains nix configs for all 3, and shares config where appropriate. I really need to write a blog post about Nix in 2023. The main issue with getting started right now is that the installer requires some convincing to use flakes (not to mention that flakes are disabled by default), and you really should be using flakes. [1]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/system/jono-desktop.nix#L153 https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/system/jono-d... [2]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.nix#L27 https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.... [3]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.nix#L138 https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.... [4]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/dconf.nix https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/dconf.ni...