dotfiles VS nixos-configs

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:

If you put your flake in a Git repository, you can reference the repo without having to clone it by using a flake reference syntax. I keep my flake in GitHub, so I use github:reckenrode/nixos-configs to reference it when running nixos-rebuild, etc.

I use a GitHub action to run nix flake update nightly to bump my flake. My systems are set to update nightly (rebooting as necessary). It’s bee mostly free of problems. I did lose my Raspberry Pi 4B+, but that was a pretty hacky set up, and I didn’t bother to dig into why it stopped booting. Otherwise, it’s been pretty smooth. The only time I’ve needed to boot into a previous generation was when I botched some config changes when updating to a new NixOS release.

I’m running NixOS on a QNAP TS-453D. I wiped the software that came with it and run on the bare metal. I’ve added 16 GiB of RAM and an AX210-based Wi-Fi card to it. Everything works pretty well with three 16 TiB SeaGate Ironwolf Pro drives on ZFS and an SSD for the NixOS install itself. My NixOS config for it is here.

DXVK is available in nixpkgs. If you install it, it provides the setup_dxvk.sh script to inject DXVK into a Wine prefix. For an example of a derivation that sets up a prefix and copies the DLLs into it manually, see the FFXIV derivation in my configs.

There are my configs: https://github.com/reckenrode/nixos-configs.

Thanks for the clarification. I think our goals are just divergent. I’m looking for something that uses the packages in nixpkgs and integrates nicely with my nixos-configs, which I use to declaratively manage my macOS environments (none of my Linux systems are capable of running the game).

My flake does most of those things. I don’t have any systems with WSL, so I’m not sure whether or how that would work. If it can be created by nixosSystem, then it would probably work. I take a pretty different approach in my flake though. I’ve structured it so I can define platforms, hosts, and users by convention. Adding a new host is just creating the right directory and dropping a configuration.nix in it. Still, that might not be helpful for your needs since you’ve already got an established convention.

I make use of multiple channels in my nixos-configs. Instead of using overlays, I pass them as specialArgs to the system build function (e.g., lib.nixosSystem). That lets me reference them in my configuration as just another set of packages (e.g., I reference flake-specific packages, unstable packages, and x86_64-darwin packages here). Note that you also need to pass them as extraSpecialArgs to your specialArgs to access them from your Home Manager configuration.

The way I handle it in my configs is to add unstable as an attribute via an overlay. If I need a package from unstable, I can use it via pkgs.unstable..