nix VS Home Manager using Nix

I was able to make the switch over cold turkey after ~9 years of ArchLinux.

By sheer happenstance, I blogged earlier this week about one particular killer feature that doesn't get enough air time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27344677

My not-flake-yet configuration can be found at https://github.com/rraval/nix

> How do NixOS users typically manage software that is not a Nix package

By writing a Nix package for it (I don't mean for this to sound flippant, tone is a bit hard to convey over text).

For example I have this alpha quality rust binary that I'm developing but I also want a stable version installed at the OS level. I write a Nix package and simply compose it into my overall NixOS configuration alongside the more official Nixpkgs: https://github.com/rraval/nix/blob/master/git-nomad.nix

> like a source code tarball where you would traditionally run configure && make && make install?

Nix has a bunch of defaults that make a conventional package like this straightforward.

Here's a package for a vanilla C binary + library that does the `autoreconf && ./configure && make && make install` dance: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/tools/secu...

It's almost a little misleading because the actual steps are largely inherited from the defaults, you can read more about `stdenv.mkDerivation` here: https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/fundamentals-of-stdenv.ht...

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.