plasma-manager VS silverblue-nix

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

Plasma-manager solves both backup and sharing.

A dude wrote a tool to configure KDE with Nix. https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager Sadly it's a bit iffy, and settings aren't applied until you relog and other things.

Normally yes with the help of home-manager, but you cannot manage your Plasma configuration declaratively, yet. I think there is an effort for configuring Plasma here, but it is not complete yet and did not get any updates since September so maybe it is abandoned or paused for now? If you are fine with using Gnome, there is a dconf module in home-manager so you can also make your desktop environment reproducible. There is also xfconf module for configuring XFCE if you prefer that but I did not use it so I don't know if it is as good as dconf.

however, there is the Plasma Manager which should give you similar or even the same experience as GNOME

Although I still have to look into plasma-manager

As for declarative usage for KDE or Firefox, while I haven't done it personally yet, it is possible by adding extra modules. Home-Manager has config options for Firefox and Plasma Manager, an home-manager module for KDE.

Think I'm going to start using plasma manager and maybe try to contribute.

I've been using plasma manager for kde, it has a command to dump the current configuration to a nix file which is convenient https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager

On NixOS (probably irrelevant for you, but may as well mention it for others) I've been using plasma-manager.

On silverblue, you just follow this guide and it uses a systemd service that uses the command chattr to make / immutable (temporary) but not the reclusive directories (that means only / not the contents inside the directories) by doing chattr -i / creates /nix and /var/lib/nix mkdir /nix mkdir /var/lib/nix then it bind mounts it mount --bind /var/lib/nix /nix then it uses chattr again to make / immutable again chattr +i / . The problem with microos is that the chattr command can't change atributes on the / directory. But is there like a way to have a /nix subvolume like how there is writable /var and /home subvolumes? Like how can you make it not part of the immutable part. you can go into the transactional update shell and type mkdir /nix and /nix is there but is not writable. Is there a way to make a subvolume and mount it as /nix and have it readable and writable?

agreed with that I only install drivers, distrobox, and qemu/virt manager on the immutable part and everything else is done with either flatpak, containers, or nix (it works on silverblue quite well. there is a guide for it)

fedora silverblue is good if you want a reliable system. you can also get traditional package management by using containers from distrobox or toolbox or you can use nix on silverblue

I find it quite useful for silverblue. I can install packages user wide or system wide without the need to layer packages. It gives me a mutable eviroment while keeping the core system safe. Proot isn't available for fedora but it is available with nix so I can have proot system wide with nix which is not possible with podman. Applications with nix start way faster than starting a podman container. It is quite useful. only downside is that you need to set SELinux to permissive (which really isn't an issue for me) there is a guide for installing nix on silverblue too.

Installing nix, you would have to disable selinux and if you use silverblue, you have to do these extra steps. it would be nice if all you got to do is type sudo dnf install nix (or sudo rpm-ostree install nix if you are on silverblue) and it would automaticly add selinux policies and automaticly have the .desktop files in ~/.nix-profile/share/applications or ~/nix/var/nix/profiles/default/share/applications for system wide automaticly show up in the DE launcher and also have sudo work with nix better. it should also work for workstation and silverblue too.

maybe install it on toolbox, distrobox, or even nix if you want to install something that isn't a flatpak. nix is good for installing other terminals, shells, and fetch programs so I don't need to layer. it also supports user wide and system wide packages. only downside is that you need to disable selinux.

you should give nix on silverbluea try

here is a guide to install it on silverblue https://gitlab.com/ahayzen/silverblue-nix

the nice thing is you can install nix package manager on other distros. it is very useful to use different shells and using neofetch without layering on silverblue. there is a guide for it

Never mind traditional package managers... you plug it in right, you can run Nix on Silverblue!

https://gitlab.com/ahayzen/silverblue-nix

NixOS people will prefer NixOS, but Silverblue seems like a nice complement to Nix if you need an FHS base system and want to retain some Nix-ish features like rollbacks and atomic upgrades.