nix-installer VS Home Manager using Nix

This is a way improved[1] version of the official installer, capable of uninstallation among many other things, there is no need to use the official one: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer

1: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer?tab=read...

The Determinate Systems nix installer is quite smooth: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/

Though it does tend to get clobbered on macOS updates.

and that's just the simple version, on Linux, and thus is likely the happy-path in CI.

When trying to use it locally on macOS, this here is just some "you wanna do _what_?!": https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/tree/v0.... (not to pick on determinate.systems, the upstream is similarly facepalm: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/installation/installing-... )

I installed nix with the following nix-installer: bash curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install Now I'm trying to install home-manager and I'm starting from 3.2 Standalone setup with the following command: bash nix run home-manager/master -- init --switch but it gives me the following error message: Could not find suitable profile directory, tried /home/tornax/.local/state/home-manager/profiles and /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/tornax

Alternatively the Determinate Systems Nix installer runs on Steamdeck. They even have instructions for setting up a Steamdeck VM where you can try out anything before buying (other than running games).

Nice write up. But my question would be why not just use the Determinate Systems Nix installer to install nix? Is there a specific reason you went with Guix?

Personally, I like using this alternate installer. I find it a bit easier to work with. https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

You should be able to install both in a container and on the host. And for the install script, no idea why it doesn't work for you, but there's also an unofficial installer you could try: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

I've installed Nix on macOS using nix-installer. Now I can start a temporary nix shell using nix-shell -p git direnv as an example, but I need both of these packages "globally" outside of a nix-shell. How do I do this on macos?

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.