dotfiles VS Home Manager using Nix

Not sure about central but just search dotfiles, config, or flake on GitHub and filter by nix language. Most dotfiles are a sort of “distro” as nix let’s you configure everything from scratch in a central way. Eg my personal dotfiles are an abstracted layer of NixOS/home manager. This can be seen honestly in a lot of popular configs. Eg my WireGuard module turns high level options into automatic configs (see: module).

What’s powerful about nix is the language IMO. I was able to build an automatic WireGuard setup[1] with tagging that automatically works on each new machine thanks to the ability to do config as code. Just provide some basic config for each machine and the code turns it into an interface with peers.

The issue to me isn’t the language persay (it’s really a tiny surface area language, see the built in/lib functions [2]) but the tooling built around packaging is a hodgepodge mess of semi-documented workarounds (with Nixpkgs blessed ways vs used libraries) and is extremely difficult to approach and understand.

[1]: https://github.com/jordanisaacs/dotfiles

Not entirely sure what you mean by policies. But you can use rycee’s buildFirefoxXpiAddon. All you need is the xpi. See: https://github.com/jordanisaacs/dotfiles/blob/master/modules/users/graphical/applications/firefox.nix for some manual packages.

As a heads up setting up gnome-keyring is an adventure in and of itself when not using GNOME which from the sounds of it you are not. It took me a month of on and off trial and error to finally quash the last of its bugs. You can search around my dotfiles where I have it working but the solutions are all over the place (modules/system/gnome/default.nix, modules/users/graphical/shared.nix, and modules/users/graphical/wayland.nix).

I’ll just add on, I use functions in my nix file to make configs (iso, home manager, nixos),: function folder. With this logic you can create basic other hosts. How they are used in used in flake.nix

I am using this repo as a guide. I created a module which has the bootloader and filesystems configuration, and here I would like to conditionally load the qemu guest configuration, based on a configured attr. When you install NixOS in a qemu vm, this import is automatically added by nixos-generate-config to /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix like so:

It's probably overkill for what you are trying to do. But I have been using home-manager [0] as a way to quickly restore my working environment.

[0] https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/

$ home-manager --version 23.05 $ nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-23.11.tar.gz home-manager $ nix-channel --update $ nix-shell '' -A install [...] All done! The home-manager tool should now be installed and you can edit /home/MY-USERNAME/.config/home-manager/home.nix to configure Home Manager. Run 'man home-configuration.nix' to see all available options. $ home-manager --version 23.05

Unfortunately until we find more volunteers in this area, it is hard to see status quo changing. See also https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/607 and this ongoing project https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

> Channels are, AFAIU, a reference to some point-in-time/commit/version of nixpkgs

It's not specifically nixpkgs, but any Nix code generally.

Per the Nix manual[0]:

> Channels are a mechanism for referencing remote Nix expressions and conveniently retrieving their latest version.

e.g. home-manager's suggested channel is just the github tarball for the relevant branch[1]:

  nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

It sounds like you'd benefit a lot from Nix/NixOS [1], if not just home-manager[2].

1. https://nixos.org/

2. https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager nix-channel --update nix-shell '' -A install

I'm using flakes and home manager and not really sure how to go about managing my neovim configuration. I've read through some other posts, github issues, and various articles trying to suss out a good way to do this. Reading through other people's configs and posts was somewhat helpful but there is a lot going on I don't understand and everyone's examples I've seen vary wildly.

Said store path contains the home-manager repo. After the home-manager run, the store path is recreated.

I can't answer all your questions, but home-manager does have a dconf module that would probably be better to use than that external tool. Everything inside the options block are the things you can pass to the dconf module.