home-manager VS impermanence

I really am at lost rn, foud this github issue tried the solution and it didn't work.

{ config, pkgs, ... }: { imports = [ (import "${builtins.fetchTarball https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz}/nixos") ]; users.users = { jdoe = { isNormalUser = true; initialPassword = "1234"; extraGroups = [ "wheel" ]; }; }; home-manager.useUserPackages = true; home-manager.users.jdoe = { home.stateVersion = "21.11"; programs.home-manager.enable = true; programs.git.userName = "John"; programs.git.userEmail = "Doe"; programs.zsh.zplug = { enable = true; plugins = [ { name = "zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions"; } { name = "romkatv/powerlevel10k"; tags = [ as:theme depth:1 ]; } { name = "ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh oh-my-zsh"; } { name = "ajeetdsouza/zoxide"; } { name = "marlonrichert/zsh-autocomplete"; } { name = "marlonrichert/zsh-edit"; } { name = "zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions"; } { name = "ptavares/zsh-exa"; } { name = "zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting"; } { name = "mbenford/zsh-tmux-auto-title"; } { name = "zsh-users/zsh-history-substring-search"; } ]; }; services.gpg-agent = { enable = true; defaultCacheTtl = 1800; enableSshSupport = true; }; }; }

There are multiple ways of managing declarative profiles. 1) Attrset, compatible with imperative use of nix-env https://git.io/fAQHW ; 2) buildEnv, providing more control over the paths that are linked into the profile https://git.io/fp0aU ; 3) home-manager, providing nixos-like config for your ~ https://github.com/rycee/home-manager

This is a tough problem to solve. I currently use NixOS with impermanence [1] which is one way of solving it. Impermanence, in short, allows you to explicitely opt-in the files and directories that are persisted after each reboot.

So while my `~` is not "clean" in the sense that all my config files are in `~/.config`, it is "clean" in the sense that all files in `~` are there for a reason (i.e., `~` is not polluted by uninstalled packages).

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence

Mostly private use, I have 2 servers and a laptop configured with this: https://github.com/matrss/nixfiles. The servers host a bunch of different services from Nextcloud to a DoT-to-ODoH proxy.

I've also introduced some light NixOS usage at work (3 hosts, one is an uptime-kuma instance, two are Forgejo Actions runners). For that I had to get some proprietary scanner software to run on it, which I could by just putting the extracted deb package in an emulated FHS environment.

Even for interfacing with legacy systems and unusual stacks I don't think you will need the escape hatch. Anything that is buildable on and above the abstraction-level of "ensure a file is present at some path with some content" should be doable declaratively, and that includes setting up an unusual software stack and running it in systemd services to communicate with some other legacy system or whatever.

The escape hatch is there to modify how NixOS itself behaves, and modifying that should only be necessary to extend NixOS' core functionality. A quick search revealed that impermanence (https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence) and in some cases sops-nix (https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix) use it, but those fundamentally extend NixOS with ephemeral root storage support and secrets management, respectively.

You might want to set up NixOS with impermanence, with something like https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence. Install an easy to use desktop environment like ElementaryOS, and configure NixOS with or without Flatpak, if you want to give the user the ability to install new software or not. Then set up automatic updates, automatic garbage collection and you have a truly stable system.

I would not call these projects unbelievable, but they are neat.

- Opt-in state: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence and https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/

That way will work - I use the impermanence module which works similarly but allows to hide mounts.

This is indeed a blind spot. Thanks for pointing that out! Silverblue -to my knowledge- doesn't do a lot to address this. Though, 3rd-party tools like Home Manager and the suite of applications developed by the folks over at uBlue might be able to limit this to a minimum. Though I'm not sure if it surpasses NixOS in this regard; for the uninitiated. Though, to my knowledge, this requires special attention and depends on the specifics of the NixOS system in question.

[3]: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence

I have recently stumbled upon Impermanence - modules to help you handle persistent state on systems with ephemeral root storage, and the concept seems quite nice.

I haven't used it yet but nix-community/impermanence has a home-manager module that might be useful.