Comment by johnvaluk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnvaluk | Hacker News Reader

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I run NixOS on a variety of laptops as my daily driver. While there's initially a steep learning curve, the time is well spent developing a reproducible configuration that you can quickly install on a new machine. I adapt the same configuration to generate a custom ISO that I write to a USB drive so I can boot into a familiar environment in a few minutes on almost any machine (running in RAM if there's enough room). It doubles as an installer (as does any NixOS installation). This approach is also handy for booting ephemeral servers on any hardware (DNS, DHCP, etc.).

One of my hobbies is recycling older machines. I've installed NixOS on Chromebooks with 16GB internal drives. It's possible if you remember to garbage collect after each successful upgrade (and stick to 64-bit machines).

I tend to treat my laptops as disposable and keep my important data on a file server so I don't rely on local disk space.

> I tend to treat my laptops as disposable and keep my important data on a file server so I don't rely on local disk space.

I do the same, except I use an extensive dotfiles, config, and bootstrap script repo[0].

So I like the idea of Nix for that reason. It's going to be hard to let go of Debian/Ubuntu, but I'd really like to have a perfectly reproducible environment like Nix.

Thanks for your reply.

0. however, I also unfortunately have to use Windows sometimes,so I dual boot, and that takes up significant room on my smallish laptop drive

I also have my dotfiles in portable repositories that must work on a variety of unices (so I don't use the popular-but-nix-specific home-manager package). My custom ISO has no user data, it just creates my immutable account with my public SSH key (in case I need to remote into the machine immediately) and has a global alias named "bootstrap" that fetches and installs my dotfiles. After that, I can pull any updates made on other machines, log in and out of the DM, etc. until I turn off the computer. I've gone weeks on the same session in RAM (waking from sleep works fine on most machines).

You should consider trying home-manager as the other reply mentioned, because it lets you stay in non-NixOS land until you get comfortable. I use my home-manager config both on NixOS and on Ubuntu to not only to handle stereotypical dotfiles like Neovim and Tmux, but also things like setting dconf keys so that GNOME is instantly set up the way I want it on any new installs.

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