I think running neovim as a standalone app is rooted in the desire to manage it with a window manager

Interesting. Makes sense.

but for me, being in the terminal is a huge plus. Pair that with tmux, and you can piece together an IDE outside of nvim as well, say, running gdb in a window compiling your app in another, and having nvim open in the next with convenient hotkeys to manage the windows and copy text fluidly between them.

I haven't worked much with either NeoVim or Tmux, but I assume there's a way to restore your most recent 'terminal-state'. Which, in turn, enables one to start working as soon as they've opened either one of NeoVim or Tmux. Am I right?

I’ve had a bit of a look into Tumbleweed and it sounds like it’s similar to Fedora in how it handles packaging of proprietary software which I found pretty annoying, but I could be wrong.

It's true that Arch is leaner towards proprietary software if that's what you mean. An example of this is how the Nvidia drivers are just found within repos for Arch (thus enabled by default), while on both Fedora and openSUSE it's not found in the official repos. Both have made it easier over the years to somehow include options and whatnot within the installer to ease Nvidia users in, but the experience on Arch is definitely smoother.

Furthermore, Fedora is indeed (kinda) hardcore on FOSS, similarly to Debian. While Arch simply doesn't care in most cases. My relatively short endeavor to find out where openSUSE fits in seems to point towards openSUSE leaning closer to Debian and Fedora.

What's perhaps important to note is that in all cases there are third party repos that can easily be enabled to acquire proprietary software.

That was perfect! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for your kind words. Much appreciated! 🙂

It does sound alot like they are taking time tested designs that have been in use in the datacenter & Infrastructure side within virtualization offerings for years

To be honest, I'm absolutely clueless on any of that 😂. So, unfortunately I don't feel confident to talk about that. Would you be so kind to enlighten me?

What exactly am I confirming? Apologies, if I sound obtuse*.

Thanks for answering!

Just to be clear; the 'metrics' on how popular Manjaro is compared to Arch and other Arch-based distros reveal to us that Manjaro has been going strong for quite some time. While the numbers of its adoption during its heyday were IMO completely justifiable. I think that -currently- it continues to stay more relevant than it otherwise would have any right of based on its merits. Which has been something that has caught my attention and made me curious to find out why that was the case.

Thus, if you had been a relatively newer user, then I would have loved to know what made you gravitate towards Manjaro in the first place. But, as you've been using it since before the controversies and archinstall, I think your reasons to start using Manjaro were completely legit and the continued use of Manjaro is at least justifiable.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not in the "Manjaro is blatantly bad"-camp, I just think that it attracts more newer users than is desirable.

Off-topic, but how long have you been using Manjaro? I am genuinely interested, btw*.

Thank you so much! Much appreciated!

Are you managing dotfiles in rootless containers?

There's not a lot to it, but I like to have my stuff related to .zshrc and .vimrc around regardless of what environment I'm in.

IMO you shouldn’t install nix in a container. If you want to customize your container, run nix outside of the container and tell home manager to apply itself to the container’s file system (home-manager build will put the result into a result directory, which you can copy). Or, you could just mount your host ~/.config on the container maybe.

Very informative! Much appreciated!

Ansible is a big project, but at the end of the day it’s just a Python package. If you already have Python installed, it’s not really adding that much.

Perhaps I should look more into this. Thanks for enlightening me on this matter!

Also obligatory advice for anyone new to Nix: use flakes. Flakes are good and right. It sucks that Nix is in a confusing transition process to flakes, but if you just adopt them completely from the start it makes everything easier. Your home manager config can live in a single flake somewhere that you find convenient, and you can apply it from there.

Noted.

This has definitely opened up both Home Manager and Ansible as potential solutions. Perhaps somewhat random, but have you by any chance engaged with Guix' guix home?

Thanks a lot for your input; much appreciated!

Let me know if you have other questions.

• Is it possible to use Nix' Home Manager to manage dotfiles within a container in such a way that changes applied to said dotfiles within the container would be 'synced' with all the other configs for existing (and future) containers?

• Is it possible to continue to have said functionality if the host doesn't have Nix' Home Manager setup/installed? (So, like, can Nix and its Home Manager be installed within a (rootless) container?)

• Are you by any chance knowledgeable on how Guix' guix home relates to Nix` Home Manager and how either of the two might be more suitable in this situation and why?

A big downside is that you will have to install the basic nix package manager to get home manager working. You don’t have to use it to install all of your software, but it will still need a /nix and a system daemon for home manager as far as I know.

It's part of the package-deal I'm willing to commit to as long as the solution suffices 🙂 .

nix doesn’t play well with container environments

I’m not sure what this means.

Perhaps I should have been more precise, but I (seemed to) recall that Nix and/or Nix' Home Manager were not installable on rootless containers. Though, I failed at finding sources on this. So it might be outdated or just blatantly false (and thus a brain fart). Thus, I'll edit the OP to reflect this. Thank you for bringing this to my attention!

What specific things are you trying to do with containers and nix?

The final solution should also be applicable in containers. Thus I thought that Nix and Nix' Home Manager therefore required to be installed/setup within the container environments as well. I might be wrong to assume this, though*.

If you don’t want to install a ~~bug~~ big (I suppose), complicated piece of software just to manage dotfiles, maybe you could consider Ansible? I know some sysadmin types who keep their local machine configs in Ansible. It has some nice bonus features, like deployment over ssh (nix can do this too btw).

Did I understand you correctly in that you posit that Ansible is more compact, less intrusive and less complicated than Nix' Home Manager? I'm not comfortable talking about Ansible, but it seemed to me like a grand tool for complete system management (at least for on new installation). Which, honestly, is pretty cool, but seemed to be overkill for what I tried to achieve here. Though, I'd love to be wrong on this. Furthermore, is Ansible container-friendly ?

I've already mentioned chezmoi in my original post. In which I further alluded that it doesn't quite satisfy my needs unless it (somehow) allows the dotfiles to be managed declaratively and 'immutable'/read-only. Do you happen to know if one is able to achieve that and (more importantly) how?

I agree that the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. If I may ask, do you remember which things caused the mental gymnastics?