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Transitioned from gnu stow to nix/home-manager and haven't looked back. The great part about that setup is my configuration contains not just my dotfiles, but

Transitioned from gnu stow to nix/home-manager and haven't looked back. The great part about that setup is my configuration contains not just my dotfiles, but also the installation of the programs themselves. I don't use the "nix" way of configuration though, I instead have home manager symlink everthing for me. Then I can bail on nix anytime and not have to translate all my files back to yaml. Glad programs like the above exist though for those who don't want to sink time into nix but want to reasonably track configuration.

bjoli 2y ago
Gnu guix has a system that does this as well. I just started using it and have had use for it already: replicating my home environment on another computer was flawless. Copied one dir over, ran guix home reconfigure and after everything installed, the environment was... Almost the same. I just need to write an integration that installs flatpaks since some apps are only available there.
jasonpeacock 2y ago
I’m fully invested in Nix/Home Manager, and I use YADM to manage the nix files and other random stuff that isn’t in Home Manager yet or doesn’t fit. IMO it’s a good fit to use them together. YADM lets me do things like easily setting per-host configurations, encrypting secret files, etc. My new host setup is to use YADM to pull my dot files, then install nix and run home-manager to install everything else. YADM even supports bootstrapping to automate that for me
- justinrubek 2y ago
  Without more information, that sounds like extra complexity. You can easily do per-host configurations using home-manager. Actually, I consider that one of the perks of the nix based setup, so I'm not sure why I'd want another tool for that.
- lillecarl 2y ago
  I wrote a little tool that symlinks stuff from your git repo into $HOME. https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/users/lillecarl/dotfiles.nix https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/users/lilleca... https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/scripts/uglinker.py https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/scripts/uglin... There's something called mkOutOfStoreSymlink that does this natively, but it makes a symlinks from $HOME -> store -> git repo which annoyed me a bit. For me getting my home environment up and running is just "FLAKE=$PWD nix run nixpkgs#home-manager -- --flake $FLAKE - - impure" It's nice to not use "Real home manager" for some kinds of configurations since Nix is pretty slow.
KolenCh 2y ago
Doesn’t that limit you to deploy dot files to nix available system only? That’s the primary reason I don’t use home manager.
aisamu 2y ago
I did almost the same, but I am converting things as slowly/lazily as possible. One thing that helped me tremendously migrating the configuration bits was to leave "scratchpads" that I could tweak quickly without a full rebuild cycle: programs.kitty.extraConfig = '' include ${config.xdg.configHome}/kitty/temporary.conf ''; Then my ~/.config/kitty looks like this: ~/.config/kitty $> ls 87 Dec 13 11:39 kitty.conf -> /nix/store/....-home-manager-files/.config/kitty/kitty.conf 381 Dec 13 11:42 temporary.conf

bjoli 2y ago

Gnu guix has a system that does this as well. I just started using it and have had use for it already: replicating my home environment on another computer was flawless. Copied one dir over, ran guix home reconfigure and after everything installed, the environment was... Almost the same. I just need to write an integration that installs flatpaks since some apps are only available there.

jasonpeacock 2y ago

I’m fully invested in Nix/Home Manager, and I use YADM to manage the nix files and other random stuff that isn’t in Home Manager yet or doesn’t fit. IMO it’s a good fit to use them together. YADM lets me do things like easily setting per-host configurations, encrypting secret files, etc. My new host setup is to use YADM to pull my dot files, then install nix and run home-manager to install everything else. YADM even supports bootstrapping to automate that for me

justinrubek 2y ago
Without more information, that sounds like extra complexity. You can easily do per-host configurations using home-manager. Actually, I consider that one of the perks of the nix based setup, so I'm not sure why I'd want another tool for that.
lillecarl 2y ago
I wrote a little tool that symlinks stuff from your git repo into $HOME. https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/users/lillecarl/dotfiles.nix https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/users/lilleca... https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/scripts/uglinker.py https://github.com/Lillecarl/nixos/blob/master/scripts/uglin... There's something called mkOutOfStoreSymlink that does this natively, but it makes a symlinks from $HOME -> store -> git repo which annoyed me a bit. For me getting my home environment up and running is just "FLAKE=$PWD nix run nixpkgs#home-manager -- --flake $FLAKE - - impure" It's nice to not use "Real home manager" for some kinds of configurations since Nix is pretty slow.

KolenCh 2y ago

Doesn’t that limit you to deploy dot files to nix available system only? That’s the primary reason I don’t use home manager.

aisamu 2y ago

I did almost the same, but I am converting things as slowly/lazily as possible. One thing that helped me tremendously migrating the configuration bits was to leave "scratchpads" that I could tweak quickly without a full rebuild cycle: programs.kitty.extraConfig = '' include ${config.xdg.configHome}/kitty/temporary.conf ''; Then my ~/.config/kitty looks like this: ~/.config/kitty $> ls 87 Dec 13 11:39 kitty.conf -> /nix/store/....-home-manager-files/.config/kitty/kitty.conf 381 Dec 13 11:42 temporary.conf