nixos-config VS nix-config

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With NixOS you declare your entire OS in a script, something along the lines of Ansible or Terraform. This can even go as far as configuring your user settings, with dotfiles, gsettings, or various other things (often the modules will expose settings in the native nix language and write out the yaml/toml/json/whatever else that is required). The idiomatic way to do this is to use the built-in NixOS configuration (under /etc/nixos) to set up system-level things: mounts, drivers, users, system-level packages (e.g. greetd+sway), and things that change rarely. You then use a project called home-manager to manage everything inside your user configuration (including applications you use), which itself uses nix. By separating it like this, I can sync my entire experience between my laptop and desktop with Git.

I am currently flighting using a separate "nix flake" for both, which allows you to pin versions of packages (with a lockfile). It also allows you to easily pull in other repositories. It hasn't really taken off yet, and the NUR (Nix User Repository, analogous to the amazing Arch User Repository) is still in infancy. I'd offer up my nix configs as an example, but I am currently in the "make it work" example. I have been yoinking several great ideas from this fantastic nix repo: https://github.com/ymatsiuk/nixos-config

The main challenge with Nix is that it doesn't have an FHS: there is no `/usr`, `/bin`, and what you would typically expect. The advantage here is that conflicting dependency versions are not a problem. The problem is that you need to either build any binaries yourself, or wrap them in an FHS helper.

Nix has a virtualenv system `nix develop` and it's very powerful, especially for teams.

Silverblue

Power user, gvolpe has a great config that heavily customizes nvim.

I forked and customized a fairly advanced Nixos configuration that I can load from a flake on github. (Mine | Original)

I think gvolpe's nix-config repo is what u/ppen9u1n was referencing. Looks like there might be some good ideas to mine there.

I've seen this done with flakes by a NixOS power user named gvolpe. He has it configured to automatically setup each of his different systems with Home Manager, a custom UI, etc. His three different build targets are:

I think NixOS would benefit from easily accessible collection of opinionated modules/profiles/configurations with minimal set of options. Something like gnome-desktop / sway-desktop / etc. Gnome actually does pretty good job here.

The point is: currently my NixOS and Home Manager configurations have over 2k LOC total. When you search for configurations on GitHub/Google you are likely to find complex ones. For example, quick search for "nixos gnome" (Google) gives me link to NixOS Wiki (which describes only Gnome part) and blog post (https://gvolpe.com/blog/gnome3-on-nixos/) which is useful but links to really huge configuration (https://github.com/gvolpe/nix-config) that is overwhelming to any beginner.

Great example of such approach is nixos-hardware (https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware) which provides one-line configuration covering hardware quirks.