config VS nix-config

For reference, I use Nix a lot. I was pushing it pretty hard at Intuit while I worked there.

All my systems are managed with it:

https://github.com/jakehamilton/config

And I have created projects like Snowfall Lib to make working with certain features easier:

https://github.com/snowfallorg/lib

Declarative home environments are pretty great. Being able to reproduce your entire user setup is fantastic when you manage multiple machines or want to make future migrations.

I run NixOS and use Home-Manager as well. This lets me define my entire system in addition to my user home contents declaratively. So with this configuration I can apply NixOS & Home-Manager to get the same results anywhere.

Here is an example of my Home-Manager configuration: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config/blob/a3da20eeab74a50a...

In this example I configure Git. This gets written to my user home's config directory.

I started by packaging Homer itself: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config/blob/main/packages/homer/default.nix

Here's my hardware config (ignore the comment, I need to remove that now): https://github.com/jakehamilton/config/blob/dev/systems/x86_64-linux/jasper/hardware.nix

Here's an example of an appimage I've packaged if it helps: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config/blob/c8476566abf46450060131be23a15910cb530208/packages/ubports-installer/default.nix

I jumped in several months ago and haven't really regretted it. The caveat being that you have to be okay with learning Nix (the language), debugging with only arcane error messages to go off of, and reading a lot of the config source because documentation is vast but shallow. If you feel like you're willing to make the tradeoff, then it is a blast and you'll be surprised you ever lived without Nix.

In case you want some inspiration or to take an existing config and run, feel free to take a peek at or use mine: https://github.com/jakehamilton/config

Power user, gvolpe has a great config that heavily customizes nvim.

I forked and customized a fairly advanced Nixos configuration that I can load from a flake on github. (Mine | Original)

I think gvolpe's nix-config repo is what u/ppen9u1n was referencing. Looks like there might be some good ideas to mine there.

I've seen this done with flakes by a NixOS power user named gvolpe. He has it configured to automatically setup each of his different systems with Home Manager, a custom UI, etc. His three different build targets are:

I think NixOS would benefit from easily accessible collection of opinionated modules/profiles/configurations with minimal set of options. Something like gnome-desktop / sway-desktop / etc. Gnome actually does pretty good job here.

The point is: currently my NixOS and Home Manager configurations have over 2k LOC total. When you search for configurations on GitHub/Google you are likely to find complex ones. For example, quick search for "nixos gnome" (Google) gives me link to NixOS Wiki (which describes only Gnome part) and blog post (https://gvolpe.com/blog/gnome3-on-nixos/) which is useful but links to really huge configuration (https://github.com/gvolpe/nix-config) that is overwhelming to any beginner.

Great example of such approach is nixos-hardware (https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware) which provides one-line configuration covering hardware quirks.