Nix / NixOS

Welcome! I use home-manager and sops-nix. Use flakes, always!

For neovim i use https://github.com/nix-community/nixvim, but i've been eyeing https://github.com/NotAShelf/nvf

For content i recommend Vimjoyer and the official NixOS wiki.

Personally i used this as a good base, to see how some things are done. But then i started doing my own thing eventually. https://github.com/Aylur/dotfiles. You can search on github for NIxOS configs to see how things are done, and you have this community to ask questions.

Have fun! If i find more resources i'll edit this comment.

I recommend adding a https://wiki.nixos.org/ search engine to your browser. Maybe it's not Arch Wiki, but it's getting better. Oftentimes I cannot find how to do something on NixOS anywhere but on the wiki

Vimjoyer on youtube has very concise and well made videos on nix.

some other resources not yet mentioned:

nixos-hardware

The Nix Way dev templates

stylix

nix-alien

flake-programs-sqlite

some advanced tools that are worth knowing about

Impermanence

nixos-anywhere

disko

things I've set up that are kinda neat:

declarative firefox

declarative email, contact, and calendar syncing

Welcome!

I highly recommend forking an advanced config and refactoring it to do what you want.

Been using Nix for just over a year.

Seconding to go with flakes. No idea wtf channels are or whatever the previous system was.

Documentation can be confusing due to changes in paradigms. The bare "nix " seems to be the most modern oppose to "nix-" (e.g., nix store vs nix-store). That said, not every feature can be found in the newer variants.

This can make following tutorials difficult if they aren't using the same paradigm.

Getting comfortable with the nix language will be helpful. Its a functional programming language, which is very different than languages like bash.

Not everything has to be done the nix-way. My nvim files are in the same repo, but I just outOfStoreSymlink them instead of wrapping them in a derivation.

Some useful packages I like not already shared.

Disk partitioning: https://github.com/nix-community/disko

Immutable: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence - Pretty much resets the system to a new install every boot. Discourages manual tweaks via sudo as they get wiped out. You can still mark certain directories to be persistent (logs, personal documents, steam games, etc.).

Nvfetcher: https://github.com/berberman/nvfetcher - Nix has a concept of overlays. You can pretty much override anything with .override (module args or inputs) and .overrideAttrs (module attribute set or outputs). Nvfetcher helps with checking different sources so you can override a packages src attribute. Why is this useful? So you can install any version you want and are not bound to nixpkgs. That doesn't mean the install script in nixpkgs will always work on newer versions, but those can be overridden as well if needed.

Note that disko, impermanence, and nvfetcher all have a flake.nix in the root of the repo. Those provide ready to go overlays so you don't have to deal with writing your own which is really nice if you want to latest version without much work when available.

@cujo

#1 is definitely skimming the original https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf
#2 is bookmarking https://github.com/tazjin/nix-1p and going poking
#3 the holy trinity of nix/nixpkgs/nixos manuals at https://nixos.org/learn which are also the reference kind of materials, not top-to-bottom bedside reading

Some swear by Nix pills https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills, but I only got to reading the relevant parts of them when I was making my own distro.

In general, poking matters much more because NixOS world is much more Lego than the now-fossilized last-century Linux one, meaning that you get much more freedom/incentive to do weird things that noone tried before, so there are fewer restrictive patterns you need to learn before you inevitably break them. If you think I've just described Windows->Linux, no, I'm describing Linux->NixOS.

Since you ask for resources, check the bookmarks section of my personal guide for configuring nixos

https://codeberg.org/BlastboomStrice/LinuxPlan/src/branch/main/LinuxPlan.md#nixos-bookmarks

Welcome aboard:)

My favorites:

Text:

MyNixOS or Search

Discourse

Official Wiki

Video:

vimjoyer

~~I tried it, and refunded the day I tried it. I was shocked to find it's just a botched mess~~

Welp, pretty sure I confused nix with something else here. Now I don't know what the thing I refunded was called. Not that it matters anyways