this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Nix / NixOS

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Hi! I'm trying out Nix and I'm trying to set up and organize everything. Usually I put all my configs in a directory which is also a git repo and synced to my NAS, using the same subfolders they'd be in, and use GNU Stow to symlink the top-level folders (/dotfiles/home/ to /home/username/, /dotfiles/etc to /etc and /dotfiles/usr to /usr) and let it do its thing. Would it cause problems to also do that for configuration.nix?

On Arch I already had a /dotfiles/etc symlinked to /etc for my custom keyboard layouts, which worked fine... until the update which moved the location of the GUI keyboard layouts. It prevented the update so I undid the symlinks, updated, and put them again to the new location... but somehow it broke everything except the tty and no Wayland compositor I tried would work anymore (and there went my record of having never broken Arch since the first install over a year ago πŸ˜… )

So I'm kinda wary of doing it on an even more critical file... but also I'm very lazy and having everything in a single repo is very convenient... How do you do it?

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[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's reassuring thanks! I'm not planning on using home manager for now because it makes more sense to keep original config files so I can use them both on Nix and Arch, but I'll need to look into it when I set up my media server (I know I know, reasonable people just do a debian server, but that seems really boring πŸ˜… ).

unrelated but fun fact: you can also ship a NixOS system without Nix, it’s not actually needed for it to run! Wait without which Nix? the package manager or the language or something else? (Why is EVERYTHING called "Nix"? 😭 )

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Wait without which Nix? the package manager or the language or something else?

Yes, without the package manager. Shipping "with a language" doesn't make much sense :)

[–] phantomwise@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

Ah for a moment I had a false hope that maybe you could replace it with another language that didn't have error messages from hell πŸ˜