nix-installers VS Home Manager using Nix

If you install it from the community RPM installer, it works as they have SELinux support added: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-installers

I tried to install the Nix package manager on my Fedora 37 machine. Having read about some issues with installing Nix with the install script on Fedora and other OS, using Selinux, I chose install via "nix-installers" rpm-packe (https://github.com/nix-community/nix-installers/issues/16). Unfortunately, I get warnings about created uids throughout the install process not being in the scope of `SYS_UID_MAX 999`. Furthermore, after rebooting the computer, I end up with a flickering black screen instead of on my (Gnome) Desktop environment.

Looks like you already found u/adisbladis legacy installers and opened a feature request for Silverblue support. Your best bet would be to start learning how SELinux policies work and see if you can adapt those for the way that you've set up Silverblue, or to see if you can modify the RPM builder to accommodate Silverblue by putting the Nix store under /var and bind mounting it onto /nix, like those other instructions floating around do.

There's work to add nix to silverblue via community packaging: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-installers/pull/8

I think nonguix also uses equivalent machinery for its Steam package: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix/-/blob/master/nongnu/pack...

Maybe there are docs on repurposing that someone more familiar with nonguix can point to.

Apparently there is an rpm-ostree-friendly RPM build of Nix that can be used to install Nix on Silverblue as well: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-installers/pull/8

It includes some code to get around the group/user management quirks that some other commenters have noted b0rked the Guix installer, so perhaps it gives an outline of how to install Guix on Silverblue for a hacker who'd like to try it :)

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.