6d ago

Relationship goals with NixOS

McMahon reaction meme depicting increasing satisfaction. Descriptions read as follows:

"You discover a new app"
"It's in Nixpkgs"
"It has a NixOS module"
"It has a Home Manager module"
"It has a Stylix module which makes it look awesome"

19 comments

I don't understand a thing.
- In Germany we would say "verstehe nix"
  
  Bitte?
  
  Gesundheit
  
  Hä?
  
  And in dutch we would say "ik begrijp er niks van"
- Just to clarify for everyone else:
  Nixpkgs is the equivalent of a core distro repository for NixOS. Instead of Core + Extra + Multilib + AUR on Arch, we just have Nixpkgs that has everything
  A Nix "module" is essentially an app with pre-packaged declarable options. So rather than just installing something as is, you can use its options to declare how you want it installed. I can get firefox, with a package definition for firefox-nightly, and also tell it which addons I want bundled, for example. 99% of the time, this is the preferred way to do things.
  Home-Manager is a third-party Nix module, that lets you declare stuff in ~/. Very convenient for shells, browsers, and whatever else you want in there. Let’s say you want to have a specific shell, with a specific ssh signing key, and whatever prompt you like. The home-manager daemon would build it for you with a new system evaluation.
  Stylix is another third-party Nix module. For supported things, it will style your apps with the preferences you've defined. Handy if you want a uniform look and feel for the things you use
  
  You use the word "declare" a lot. I am not sure, but in Nix I declare the desired state of installed packages and configurations in an obscure language and the package manger takes care of that, right?
  Now the module declare reasonable default configurations? Like http server starts on system start and serves on port 80?
  Now you lost me at the Home-Manger. I can declare stuff in my home folder. OK, so for user-wide configuration? For packages and configuration in the user space? Or what?
I've been maining Linux for a decade and I'm completely lost. I think I need to catch up
- Don't worry, nothing about Linux was spoken here.
Someday I'm gonna check out NixOS
While i like NixOS as an entire OS as well, at the moment i'm experimenting with just using nix + home manager on top of whatever distro i want, and i just had the realization that in the rare case that a package is not in nixpkgs, if you make your own derivation for it to build it from source, you can take that with you anywhere as well and don't have to make another package for different distros you might be running. Pretty cool.
confused Guix noises
The home manager documentation bothers me a lot
- Usually, https://home-manager-options.extranix.com/ is all I need. For the inital setup there are plenty of blog posts and wiki articles.
  
  Ah cool, I'll check it out.
  
  Yeah that's what i use now too. The official home manager page kinda sucks purely because it has no search function. You're scrolling forever until you finally find what you're looking for lol.

19 comments