I’ve been reading a lot about NixOS lately and wanted to learn more so I’ve took the plunge and now using it as my daily driver. Hopefully I’ll learn more and get a better understanding of it by actually using it. Not sure if I’ll keep it permanently or go back to Fedora Silverblue, but nothing ventured nothing gained.

NixOS, a Linux distribution based on the purely functional package management system Nix, that is composed using modules and packages defined in the Nixpkgs project.

Installation⌗

Graphical installer was very straight forward, so nothing untoward to mention here.

Configuration⌗

Nix is a tool that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Learn how to make reproducible, declarative and reliable systems.

Configuration is declared in a single file /etc/nixos/configuration.nix I’ve moved mine to my home directory and symlinked it to the default path though, as I wanted to manage my environment with Home Manager.

Package installation⌗

Packages can now be installed by declaring them as follows:

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  firefox
  lazygit
  librewolf
]

and so on.

After making changes to the config run the following in terminal:

nixos-rebuild switch

to rebuild the system configuration and create a new generation.

The newly added packages are now available and ready to use.

Goal⌗

My main goal will be to get the system configured and working to my liking, ultimately to have all development requirements defined per project via nix-shell’s or nix develop if I switch to using flakes.