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>After this foundation is laid, there's no reason we can't add more "tutorial/wizard" flows, just as Microsoft kept revamping the Windows "control panel" but kept the old version.
Well put, this is exactly the goal. https://github.com/nix-gui/nix-gui/issues/77
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For dev environment s I would recommend taking a look at devshell: https://github.com/numtide/devshell
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WorkOS
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+ https://looking-glass.io/ very successfully
Can theoretically game on Linux and windows at same time with just a single gpu (2080 ti), mainly use it cause I only have single gpu and I don't want to loose hardware acceleration on Linux, the nixos module both applies a the vgpu unlocker for consumer graphic cards (so u can split a gpu in multiple virtual gpus) https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock
And merges it with the GeForce drivers so the host gpu does not stop having display output
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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.
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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.
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InfluxDB
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nix-direnv
A fast, persistent use_nix/use_flake implementation for direnv [maintainer=@Mic92 / @bbenne10]
> Is either #NixOS or #GUIX usable as an OS for day-to-day use (coding, browsing, occasional gaming)?
Yeah, definitively. I use only NixOS on all my machines for about 3 years already. My machines are working so well nowadays that I rarely have to change anything [1], even during major upgrades (between stable versions).
I don't fear anymore if a machine could break tomorrow. I know that it will be very easy to restore it to a working state. Last time my working notebook broke I didn't even bother making a backup (except from some data on my Home), just installed my config and it worked exactly it was working before. Also, I don't fear changing my system: if something brokes after the changes, I can just rollback.
I use for all those three purposes, mainly coding and browsing, but some light gaming. Steam actually works better on NixOS than any other distro I tested before thanks to the isolation that Nix provides.
> a question on dev environment isolation. [...] Or is it better to just use their respective package managers on top of regular Linux?
I imagine those are part of the same question. Generally what I recommend for newbies is to start small: yeah, it is fine to continue using your respective package manager, specially if you don't need "native compilation" [2].
After you get more experience with Nix though, I would recommend you to start isolating your development environments. Nix has its own `nix-shell`, that it is kinda bare-bones but works well, and can be very practical once you use something like `nix-direnv` (https://github.com/nix-community/nix-direnv/). There is also this `devshell` (https://numtide.github.io/devshell/intro.html) project that is interesting.
> Also, anyone here doing desktop #virtualization? Is there a sense of running a #VM per project? Is that a viable alternative to dual-booing Windows when I want to do some Windows dev or play a game?
I put those two questions together because yes, I ran desktop virtualization on NixOS, and yes, I ran Windows on a VM to play games thanks to PCI-e passthrough (my dedicated GPU is connected directly to the Windows VM so the performance is near native).
Again, I will not recommend you do to this right after starting NixOS since it is one more thing to possible frustrate you, but just so you know that it works and works well, specially because my VM configuration on NixOS is also on my `/etc/configuration.nix` and it is fully reproducible. Coincidentally I was messing with my VM settings yesterday and "broke" my VM multiple times, however I just run one command and restored it to the previous state.
However I never bothered to dual-boot NixOS/Windows, because I barely use Windows nowadays so I find rebooting my system just to use Windows bothersome. Probably not your case, so maybe dual-boot makes more sense. This article should help and seems very easy to do (again, disclaimer, not tested because I never needed it): https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Dual_Booting_NixOS_and_Windows.
About the VM per project, unless you want to do this for some other reason (security maybe?), you don't need to. As I said before, you can use things like `nix-shell` and this will already give isolation enough for development purposes.
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But remember, start small. Nix/NixOS is a journey. You will learn eventually what you need. However, if you try too many things at the same time you will feel frustrated. The official documentation is good, however it kinda assumes that you know what we are talking about already, and it is also very big and not well separated in steps, so it feels overwhelming for newbies. To supplant this there are many blog posts, however some of them are out-of-date (it shouldn't be too much of an issue though, since Nix tries really hard to backwards compatible).
You will eventually need to learn the minimum of the language to read the source code. It is less difficult than it seems, because while Nix as a language is strange at the first glance, it is a very well designed DSL for the domain. After sometime editing your own configuration you will naturally learn the Nix language, and can start to understand what is happening.
[1]: well, I am on a "coding spree" right now so I am doing many changes, most to refactor some things that I wasn't happy before; but before this coding spree my configuration didn't change significantly for almost a year.
[2]: what I call having to compile C/C++ libraries in an another language like Python (giving it an example here, almost any language has a similar mechanism since C/C++ ecosystem is huge), that generally needs to dynamically link with whatever you have in your system installed. This is possible on Nix/NixOS, and easy once you know what you're doing, but it is different from anything else so it does trip newbies.
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There’s no official support for non-free but the GUIX community has created a number of channels for non-free packages. I believe this is the main one:
https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
More if you google “GUIX nonfree”.
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Also considering posting your ideas to the Nix forums or possibly github issues, lots of activity there and you’ll probably get some good feedback before publishing.
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looks exactly like a block in curly brace imperative languages.
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Fortunately, there's work to separate Nix (the tool) from Nix (the language), so that any configuration language can be used to produce derivations. Nickel has been one of the drivers of this push:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nickel-the-nix-language-spin-o...
