fleek VS nixos-generators

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.

https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators

Those Linode instructions are about installing an OS from an installation ISO from Linode's rescue mode. -- I'd consider that more a 'plus' to Linode that you get to be able to install whatever unsupported Linux on Linode's VMs. But, of course it's not as smooth as the officially supported images.

Sibling comment mentions that NixOS provides ways to build VM images (e.g. https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators has a generator specifically for Linode).

Another option is to use nixos-infect, which will replace a Linux distribution with a NixOS distribution. https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect

> At that point, I feel like all of the repeatability gains are gone. If I want to spin up a fresh server, I have to read a guide and set stuff up by hand?

Just as with ansible, "git pull to deploy". You'd keep a copy of your NixOS configuration.nix somewhere else, and would be able to apply it later.

> it really does let me just get a new VPS and deploy to it very fast

Using a tool you're familiar with to get the job done is going to be faster than learning to use a tool you're unfamiliar with.

I believe much of the use of NixOS is for hobby stuff, and for personal machines. (c.f. "In what environments do you use Nix", Development (1242) vs Home Server (845) vs Production (386) https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983).

If you need to generate lxc container in NixOS then perhaps this repo might be useful: https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators this article uses it https://www.thedroneely.com/posts/running-nixos-linux-containers/

You might wanna check out nix-community/nixos-generators, it’s maintained by the same dude as Disko

You can look at nixos-generators for support code that well let you take existing configs and build a variety of bootable images from them.

You should take a look at NixOS Generators, it's a flake with configs to build common formats like ISO, LXC, Docker, etc. I use that to generate an ISO with my config, specifically the packages.iso section.

I am trying to make use of https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators to generate qcow2 images from a NixOs configuration. Since it will be used with Scaleway, they require an efi bootable image.

I haven't migrated machines from one vm provider to vmware, but I have provided a number of pregenerated nixos images (along the line of https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators) to clients to install onto vmware (and other - hyperv, xen, qemu, physical) hosts.