fleek VS homies

I think the fastest path to adoption is to build a front-end for nix so that non-technical users can use it like they would Ubuntu. Users could select packages and edit system config through a GUI, which would be built/deployed when the the user clicks "save" or whatever, with an "advanced" mode where users could edit and add extra text config if they wished. SnowflakeOS [1] and Fleek [2] are admirably starting to work towards that, but there isn't enough of a concerted community effort to make it a first class feature of NixOS. If/when something like this were mature, you could then take it to the next level, where you could have something similar to an "app marketplace" where users could share flakes or sets of config that do things, like "Jake's blinged out desktop" or "Home router setup", essentially adding an additional layer of easy composability on top of base packages that most systems support.

Apologies if there is already a concerted community effort here and I was unaware of it.

[1] https://snowflakeos.org/

[2] https://getfleek.dev/

If I understand it right, https://getfleek.dev/ will turn a simpler yaml config into home-manager/nix/flake config. Might be a simpler way to get started.

Haven't started down into the Nix abyss myself though…

Coincidentally I came across Fleek this morning, which appears to be a simplified Nix abstraction?

https://getfleek.dev/

Assuming that rebasing under uBlue is no different than under regular Silverblue, it's good to know that experimenting as such can populate your home folder with unwanted (dot)files. Therefore, either make use of a dotfiles- and/or home-manager like Fleek or backup your home folder (perhaps with Btrfs as demonstrated by Stephen's Tech Talks).

Seems like that might be the way to go, I have also found fleek and it does exactly what I want but idk if i want to use nix.

This is awesome! I utilize `nix` on Linux and Mac but I haven't "drank the kool-aid" so I utilize `nix profile` and a makefile:

https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile

Fleek basically replaces my hacked together work flow with something that I'd actually utilize on a daily basis! Nix shouldn't be an all or nothing thing and this is one step closer to making it a generally available set of technology.

I see a lot of people mentioning home-manager / nix in the comments. I tried drinking the nix kool-aid and home-manager and all that was a little too much more me and landed on a hybrid approach:

https://github.com/sontek/homies

1. I use a `justfile` that calls `nix profile install ...` to install my packages, rather than using a nix configuration file. This allows me to use a standard package manager workflow rather than going "all in".

https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile#L24-L2...

2. I then use GNU Stow to install my dotfile configuration:

https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile#L93-L9...

I think this is a great middle ground where I can utilize `nix` as my package manager across Linux and Mac and have consistency while not having to learn the whole configuration language or change my workflow.

The other tools I use heavily in my environment:

- https://asdf-vm.com/: I find this better than installing python/node/etc from nix.

- https://github.com/casey/just: I use this as my command runner (similar to make but cleaner in my opinion)

Yeah, I think its things like this that make it hard to adopt nix. All I want is a way to say "I want jq, kubectl, and terraform installed" and have it available globally. Not for specific projects or anything like that.

Right now I maintain a makefile that installs everything for me using `nix profile`:

https://github.com/sontek/homies/blob/master/justfile#L14-L2...

Which almost exactly like I want. Only issue is sometimes a new hash is generated (which I don't understand.. maybe a config update in the repos?) and the makefile can't run anymore:

    error: packages '/nix/store/y65pp5hipid0fzxl1z7xjxdk4h9jwfw7-exa-0.10.1/bin/exa' and '/nix/store/gy0bqcs9mcan8af47wakdylhal67dpy4-exa-0.10.1/bin/exa' have the same priority 5; use 'nix-env --set-flag priority NUMBER INSTALLED_PKGNAME' to change the priority of one of the conflicting packages (0 being the highest priority)