@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

Atemu

@Atemu@lemmy.ml

Interested in Linux, FOSS, data storage systems, unfucking our society and a bit of gaming.

I help maintain Nixpkgs.

github.com/Atemu
reddit.com/u/Atemu12 (Probably won’t be active much anymore.)

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NixOS beginner resources

Heya, been hearing about NixOS for a long time now, mostly from the peeps over at the Linux Unplugged podcast. So was thinking about jumping onto the nix-train, however it seems like it has a learning curve. Does anyone have any good learning resources, blog-posts, guides, whatever beans that you used to get started with NixOS?...

Atemu,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

The best way I know of is to get yourself a VM and get into the weeds; try to configure a system to your liking.

Follow the NixOS manual. The Wiki is unofficial; often opinionated, out of date or just plain wrong. Take it with a grain of salt. The canonical source of documentation is the NixOS manual and it’s not nearly as bad as you may have heard.

Make extensive use of search.nixos.org/options or man configuration.nix. Finding and making proper use of options and the module system is the bread and butter of using NixOS.

Eventhough everyone and their mom will recommend them to you for nebulous reasons, ignore flakes for now. You will know when you’ll benefit from using them; namely when you need to use something outside of NixOS/Nixpkgs. You’re going to have enough to figure out with plain old NixOS on its own though; I don’t have external dependencies in my config to this day.

To wrap it up, make sure to ask the community if something’s not working as expected: github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs#community

Atemu,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

Note that while they’re disingenuously proclaiming themselves to be a “free” tool, the license is actually an unfree proprietary custom license.

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