Its especially annoying for me because i wanna go back to something that “just works” but i miss the nix features. I like declaring my system but managing packages declaratively is just such a pain. I just wanna do apt-get install package its just easier i dont want to rebuild my whole ass system. Something i found that may work is using nix for the system and then distrobox for packages. Yall think thats something that would work well?

NixOS is probably a bit more confusing than most Linux distros, but it has a huge amount of advantages too. It has very up to date software and probably never has dependency issues.

There is a Gnome/KDE installer too now ;)

This is the opposite of me. I always get nervous when I don’t have precise control over how the disk layout looks. I explicitly decided for the non-graphical installer when I first downloaded NixOS

Wow thanks I was wondering for a while if something like this existed! I’m very happy with regular Arch, but I am very curious to try both an immutable/atomic and a declarative distro. At least the second I guess I can kina replicate now with this. Another rabbit hole to go down I think. :D

Yeah, you want to sniff nix first before you mainline nixos.

Even when using in a basic way, I think it has one very tangible advantage: the fact that you can “compartmentalize” different aspects of your configuration.

Let’s say I set up a specific web service that I want to put behind a reverse proxy, and it uses a specific folder that doesn’t exist yet, like Navidrome which is a web-based audio player. It requires a set of adjustments of different system parts. My nix file for it looks like this:

{ config, ... }:

let
  domain = "music." + toString config.networking.domain;
in
  {
    services.navidrome = {
      enable = true;
      settings = {
        Address = "127.0.0.1";
        Port = 4533;
        MusicFolder = "/srv/music";
        BaseUrl = "https://" + domain;
        EnableSharing = true;
        Prometheus.Enabled = true;
        LogLevel = "debug";
        ReverseProxyWhitelist = "127.0.0.1/32";
      };
    };

    services.nginx = {
      upstreams = {
        navidrome = {
          servers = {
            "127.0.0.1:${toString config.services.navidrome.settings.Port}" = {};
          };
        };
      };
    };

    services.nginx.virtualHosts."${domain}" = {
      onlySSL = true;
      useACMEHost = config.networking.domain;
      extraConfig = ''
        include ${./authelia/server.conf};
      '';
      locations."/" = {
        proxyPass = "http://navidrome";
        recommendedProxySettings = false;
        extraConfig = ''
          include ${./authelia/proxy.conf};
          include ${./authelia/location.conf};
        '';
      };
    };

    systemd.tmpfiles.settings."navidrome-music-dir"."${toString config.services.navidrome.settings.MusicFolder}" = {
      d = {
        user = "laser";
        mode = "0755";
      };
    };
    systemd.services.navidrome.serviceConfig.BindReadOnlyPaths = ["/run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf"];
      
    security.acme.certs."${config.networking.domain}".extraDomainNames = [ "${domain}" ];
  }

All settings related to the service are contained in a single file. Don’t want it anymore? Comment it out from my main configuration (or whereever it’s imported from) and most traces of it are gone, the exception being the folder that was created using systemd.tmpfiles. No manually deleting the link from sites-available or editing the list of domains for my certificate. The next generation will look like the service never existed.

And in my configuration, at least the port could be changed and everything would still work – I guess there is room for improvement, but this does what I want pretty well.