config VS nixos-hardware

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

Always useful to look at the seemingly endless stream of Linux information, the Arch wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ASUS_ROG_Zephyrus_G14_(2022...

Also NixOS has a nixos-hardware repository with configurations for some laptops:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/tree/master/asus/zep...

Reasonably legible if you ever programmed anything

{ imports = [ # Include the results of the hardware scan. ./hardware-configuration.nix # Additional hardware specific configuration # https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware ];

You could try this repo for hardware support on various laptops if yours is on it: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware

Btw, for starters, I think you can learn a lot by checking other's configurations and from things like https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware. There are a lot of useful/essential configurations that are not enabled by default.

in that case do note that this module assumes you use nixos-hardware, otherwise you can remove lines 161-165. I can also send you my VM's libvirtd .xml file when you get around to creating it.

My computer is a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with a dual GPU setup (AMD iGPU + Nvidia DGPU) where I'm using a "hybrid mode" configuration provided by nixos-hardware, using PRIME offload.

Not too long ago nixos-hardware changed the default Xorg driver for AMD to modesetting from amdgpu.