nixpkgs-config VS nix

You can also take a look at my server configuration which uses flakes. And my separately-managed home-manager configuration which also uses flakes

My "rice": https://github.com/jonringer/nixpkgs-config

I configure my neovim through home-manager. My configuration. Pulling vimPlugins from nixpkgs should give you something which works with NixOS (or anywhere for that matter, NixOS is essentially a clean room).

My dot file repo.

Home-manager link My example setup

Reference: - home.nix entry - Which refers to it's own dedicated file

If you want to take nix for a spin, i would recommend trying home-manager. It's essentially NixOS, but for dot files. It can install packages and services in addition to manage configuration. Also, I've been able to get it work on NixOS, WSL2, ubuntu, and macOS. Personal configuration if you're curious how it would look.

> And about Home Manager, the reason why I think it's over-hyped is because it provides a declarative approach to something that was... already declarative. Your $XDG_CONFIG directory does not need a leaky Nix abstraction on top of it

I don't really agree, I spent about 30mins to get my home-manager config to support an m1 mac [0]. I don't really want to think how long it would take me to look up all of the homebrew package names, and learn a new package manager. Instead, I just pushed all of the linux-specific items into their own bin, a little more logic, and I was able to get back to a comfortable terminal + git + vim settings.

Also, nix exposes congruent configuration management[1]. The state of my system is an exact reflection of the configuration. With other tools like ansible, vagrant, etc, I would get reconciliation configuration which is close on initial install but configuration drift is an ever-present concern; not to mention that large recipes and playbooks can take a very long time to run. Going the homebrew route would be divergent configuration, it would be very hard for me to get back to a certain configuration. With nix (and by extension home-manager), I can version control the configuration, improve it, roll it back, w/e I want.

> Why would I write my i3 config in Nix??

You do get some type checking, although the iteration time would probably be similar. You could also just do `xsession.windowManager.i3.extraConfig = builtins.readFile ./i3.config;` if you really just wanted to wholesale read in your existing profile.

> I'd rather just use `nix-env` personally.

nix-env is a double edge sword. You can rollback (somewhat, I believe it's just a stack of all changes), which is an improvement. However, nix only retains the "derivation name" to try and management. But for packages like python38, if you try to upgrade it, it will determine that `python-3.11-a3` is the package which is the most up-to-date. I try to discourage using nix-env.

[0]: https://github.com/jonringer/nixpkgs-config/commit/37ddfefa1...

Here and full config here

> https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/9911#issuecomment-19252073...

As we covered in my last post, NixOS is a amazing Linux distribution for creating stable and declared environments. Now while this is amazing for a desktop setup, it is also perfect for a home-server or home-lab.

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Nix is a cross-platform package manager. It uses the nix programming language. Nix and NixOs are often used in the same context, but while the first is a package manager, the latter is a linux distribution based on nix.

Today I want to talk to you about Nixos. What is it? Nixos is a declarative and reproducible OS, partly taking the words used on their own page. What does that mean?

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

- it reduces bloat, because you can generate an environment or OS image with only the software needed to run a specific program or service

My guess is that a big efficiency gain would come from the second point, because you don't waste CPU on code that you don't use.

Does this make sense? Has anyone explored this?

[0]: https://nixos.org

1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity