@zonsopkomst - eviltoast

Where I post interesting things for family, friends, and myself. Note: I post items I don’t necessarily agree with.

#fedi22 #nowplaying #economics #Christian #Lutheran #government #finance #movies #parody #comedy #foss #classicalliberalism #music #Archlinux #NixOS

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2022

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  • I switched from Arch to NixOS around Nov 2023 and manage my systems and my family’s off of one flake. Dotfiles are managed within my flake (if easier), an exception would be Emacs, which I use syncthing between my Nix systems and a work Windows PC with straight.

    Discourse, Discord/Matrix, the wiki and various blogs are places to learn from. Documentation is sometimes difficult to splice together, other times very intuitive, but others can help direct you. Just leave some lead time for people to get back to you.

    If you can figure out how to do gaming on Arch, you can figure it out on NixOs. Add to you config or flake slowly and back it up somehow before making changes, along with important files. You can always rollback or if you do manage to nuke it (I have twice due to lack of HD memory), reinstall and be up and running in a short time frame as long as you have your config somewhere.

    I’ve done more on NixOS in a shorter time than I ever had on Arch, but also learned a lot from Arch which helped. Try it out on an old machine or VM to see what you can do with it. I’ve plateaued at getting a server up and running, and ricing hyprland, but that is due to lack of time and close to zero knowledge.



  • Thanks for the details. I’ve jumped around, but use Gnome as it just works and I don’t have to tweak much. It sounds like hyprland would allow more control, that after I got past the initial setup, I could kind of set it and forget it, until I wanted to add to it as the landscape changes over the years. Maybe I will continue with both hyprland & Gnome until I get my footing.

    Good to know that you can use GUI along with TUI. I would want a GUI wifi manager, because I don’t want to mess around with configuring my wifi in the terminal.

    Home-manger is great, but yeah, I get the original sentiment. Flakes and home-manager are complicated, until they are not. :)

    Also good to hear it works great with gaming. I was just concerned that because most games are full screen and Gnome does it for you, that it would nuke your window setup in a tiling window manager like hyprland, but again I’ve never used a tiling window manager (other than failing with herbstluft many years ago).

    Wayland is great. Just need to figure out remote access and I think I have all the features that X11 offered at this point.

    I didn’t say it earlier- but your setup looks great btw.


  • Never used a tiling window manager. What additional programs/packages does one need to make it functional? For the most part, as everyone’s usage is different. And does it work with gaming without making you read through a manual to setup the frame/window correctly? Would be interested in trying hyprland, but don’t want to sink weeks into tweaking it. :)











  • I dislike that it is hard to find relevant instructions on what you are looking for. That being said, there are many channels- Matrix, Discourse, Discord, Lemmy, that have a lot of smart people that are willing to help.

    I’m not a programmer and I run NixOS on my personal, family, and friends’ PCs. After about three months of struggling severely, I was able to get my one flake git repo to the point where I have installed it and replaced other linux distros with NixOS on these machines. I also don’t often understand the warnings that are displayed when rebuilding a configuration, but have been able to solve them so far with a little guess work sometimes.

    I’m setting them up with syncthing for their home directories and am looking into some easier than rsync based programs to keep them backed up. Then I can easily reinstall NixOS, git clone the flake, and have them back up and running in the event that they nuke their PC. This hasn’t happened yet, unlike on other distros. Plus, I have only received complements about the systems. Someday, if Wayland gets there, I will be able to remotely access them. There probably is a way, but I haven’t figured out an easy way to do so yet.

    So overall more happy and satisfied, because all things tech take time and learning.

    Next step is to port my Ubuntu server over to NixOS and probably use Docker to spin up webapps. Maybe even declare them the nix way.


  • Congrats! It took me three months to get everything running the way I wanted. Now I run a bunch of machines off of a single flake, managing family and friend’s machines too. Next is moving my server over to nixos. Read through the wiki and site, get on the nixos discord or matrix site, ask questions, use the discourse, and when you feel confident nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#!