The genesis of a nixOS user

It's simple. Like git, you search the command on the internet

Have you considered GUIX instead? Same concept, but with added GNU and configured entirely with Guile Scheme, apparently.

It's much simpler because you're using text files to define the expected state, the cli is there only to tell nix to figure out what it needs to do and to get on with it. Meanwhile with git you're manually doing each of the steps until you reach the desired state.

I only need cd ~/dotfiles/nix/ && nix-channel --update && nix flake update && home-manager switch for everyday package management. It's the nix version of apt update upgrade and install.

nix shell and nix run are pretty useful as well, and you'd want home-manager generations to rollback.

The confusion arises because there are 5 different ways to do the same thing, the non-experimental methods shouldn't be used even though they're recommended in the official docs, and you need to get lucky to get the info that you can use home-manager and that one liner.

[rest of post]
Anti Commercial-AI license

Hey look, the trend is spreading: you're the second user I've seen doing that.

It'd be nice if the Lemmy devs added some sort of metadata field to support that so that (a) we could have a preference to insert it into every new comment automatically, and (b) it could be reduced to a badge on the comment header or something so that it would be less obtrusive to those of us who aren't trying to do anything that would require us to pay attention to it.

It's pretty easy for home-manager use, but still really useful. You can:

• choose which packages to install from stable and which from unstable
• add packages from repos that have flake.nix in them
• correctly match nix and home-manager versions, and always update them at the same time
• allow-unfree without nixpkgs conf, so 1 less directory required in .config (if they accepted the "experimental" features it'd be down to 1)

Here's an example:

{
  description = "home flake";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    home-manager.url = "github:nix-community/home-manager/master";
    home-manager.inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    nixpkgs-stable.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-23.11";

    # nixgl.url = "github:guibou/nixGL";
  };

  outputs =
    {
      self,
      nixpkgs,
      nixpkgs-stable,
      home-manager,
      # nixgl,
      ...
    }@inputs:
    let
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      pkgs = import nixpkgs {
        system = system;
        config = {
          allowUnfree = true;
        };
      };
      pkgsStable = import nixpkgs-stable {
        system = system;
        config = {
          allowUnfree = true;
        };
      };
    in
    {
      homeConfigurations = {
        shareni = home-manager.lib.homeManagerConfiguration {
          inherit pkgs;
          modules = [ ./home.nix ];
          extraSpecialArgs = {
            inherit inputs;
            inherit system;

            kmonad = pkgsStable.kmonad;
          };
        };
      };
    };
}

That's such a bad name, I only see lixmaballs.

How do you like it, that's one of the earlier forks, right?

I’m going to have to come back to Nix/NixOS in a bit.

Use nix + home-manager first for sure. It's far easier, and you can slowly get into it while making a list of bleeding edge packages.

I’ll probably wait until the official docs catch up as it appears that they are quite a bit behind

Skip them altogether when you're starting out. I gave up on trying nix the first few times due to how bad they are. zero-to-nix.com is better for learning the basics of nix.

That and I’m not sure how I feel about a DSL for package management. I’d much rather use JSON or YAML, or even INI or TOML.

The closest you can get is home-manager with a list of packages in a json-like format. It's really not practical to develop a declarative system without a programming language. A basic example would be variables, more advanced would be to write a wrapper that modifies the package so it automatically runs the required cli commands to use your dediated gpu and nixGL with specific packages (nvidia-run-mx nixVulkanNvidia-525.147.05 obs for example).

It's sort of like IaC where you've got terraform (dsl), pulumi (various languages), and cloudformation (json/yaml). Can you guess which one is universally despised?

Maybe if I were a LISP or Haskell guy.

Then you'd use guix and a dsl made within an actual programming language (much better approach IMO).

declarative > imperative all day, every day