[jerry1979]

Since you are evangelizing a little bit, I have a question about nix. I'm a debian user, and I see debian as a base layer. It takes care of security updates and miscellaneous system configurations so I don't have to. In a way, it shifts under my feet, and I like that because those shifts are necessary for security and progress. How are you able to use nix in a way that allows those shifts to silently occur while at the same time maintain full control over your system's configuration? I imagine there must be some kind of tension between fully specifying what you want vs allowing experts to take care of configurations as they see fit.

Thanks!

[packetlost]

You don't really fully specify most things. A complete working NixOS config with a few core utilities is like 50 lines without comments. Here is my main workstation's full definition: https://git.sr.ht/~chiefnoah/nixos/tree

It's split up into multiple files, but even the total combination is not that much. If you let Nix take over your system (ie. NixOS) it moves out from underneath you in a completely reproduceable and revertable way so you can almost always just... run the equivalent of a dist-upgrade daily and get on with your life because you're 1 command away from undoing it all.

You'll obviously have more the more you customize things, but for the most part its services.<service>.enabled = true;. The defaults are usually good enough IME.

[jerry1979]

Your repo is very helpful. Really great comments. It's too bad that I'm so busy. The Nix sirens are certainly calling, but I'll have to plug my ears for now.