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:hammer_and_wrench: :heart: Want to know NixOS & Flakes in detail? Looking for a beginner-friendly tutorial? Then you've come to the right place! 想要学习使用 NixOS 与 Flakes 吗？在寻找一份新手友好的教程？那你可来对地方了！
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Simple and documented config templates to help you get started with NixOS + home-manager + flakes. All the boilerplate you need!
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their GH releases page has a PDF, if that helps you, or browsing around the .md files may help what I presume is your noscript browser, assuming that GH works with noscript anymore: https://github.com/ryan4yin/nixos-and-flakes-book/releases/d...
For some more context: Flawed as they are, Flakes solve a large number of problems Nix experiences without them. This is why I, and presumably many others, use them even in their current experimental state.
An RFC was recently accepted to commit to forming a plan towards stabilization of Flakes: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/136
Personally, I don't believe there won't be any breaking changes, but I also believe that the stabilization of Flakes is still a ways away and hope that there will be a reasonable migration path.
So, it took me an inordinate amount of effort to get to this point, but I find managing my nixos laptop to be idiotically easy now. And, to be clear, I'm not a developer. I just want an easy to use config that I can port over to a new laptop when the time is right (and maybe port a similar config over to my desktop as well, once I get around to installing NixOS).
It's very weird, because I went from "WHY IN GOD'S NAME WOULD ANYONE WANT THIS?" to "my life is now measurably better" over the span of about 48 hours, and I have no idea what clicked. Something about adding flakes to the mix (NixOS + HM + flakes) broke the logjam. Or maybe it was simply how damned useful this config was to learn from:
https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-starter-configs
I went from that to a per-user, per-machine (with defaults for each) config in about an hour, and I haven't fundamentally changed that setup since. I have no idea why it's so compelling to me, but the combination of being able to tell the machine how to configure itself in one place with the ease of adding software ... I'm going to spin up a config this weekend and put it on my kid's laptop. There are other tools to accomplish the same thing, but NixOS is just so easy ... and poorly documented ... and has weird CLI conventions ... and doesn't do a super job of garbage control ... and
I use NixOS as a daily driver. (My previous Linux of choice had been Arch).
I'd describe Nix as 95% wonderful, 5% hugely painful.
I learned Nix by using it on macOS/Linux before trying NixOS. I was concerned that NixOS would be very difficult to use.
It was easier to use NixOS than I expected; the main problems I ran into were when a tool would helpfully download some kind of binary, but since NixOS doesn't put its shared libraries where other Linuxes do, these programs wouldn't work. -- Though, for a popular-enough tool, most likely someone else already has a Nix package written that helps out.
There are other "escape hatches". e.g. I think something like distrobox could be used if native-on-NixOS stuff has problems. https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox
Nix can otherwise be difficult if you need to write some Nix code. There are several concepts in Nix which are foreign enough to how things have been done before; e.g. when building a package, it won't have access to $HOME; but, recent language tooling will often want access to $HOME. -- If something goes wrong, you may often need a wider and deeper understanding compared to if something goes wrong on a more typical Linux distribution.
For as difficult as it is, the trade-offs Nix makes are essentially "I'm going to put in a lot of effort now, so that I don't have to put in effort some time later". (This favours Nix when "effort later" is multiplied many times).
Overall, as a choice for "I need this to work right now", I'd recommend against NixOS (especially for someone who doesn't know Nix).