Getting started with NixOS - looking for tutorials (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 8 months ago by silmaril@discuss.tchncs.de to c/nixos@infosec.pub

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I heard a lot about the concepts of nix and NixOS and I'd love to try it.

After installing the VirtualBox demo, I keep getting stuck with every tiny step I take, though.

So I was wondering if there are any tutorials for beginners that you can recommend?

I couldn't find anything on the internet - everything that looks like a tutorial presumes a lot of things everybody seems to know about nix, so no need to explain those.

Where can I find those explanations to make the first baby steps with NixOS?

To put it in other words: Where is NixOS for dummies?

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[-] sajran@lemmy.ml 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I've been playing with NixOS in spare time for a few weeks now and I'm afraid I don't have a very good news for you. It looks like the learning curve is just very steep. It took me quite a lot of time to get to the point where I have any idea what I'm doing. Some beginner friendly resources which helped me:

Vimjoyer videos on YT,
LibrePheonix videos on YT,
Misterio77 Nix starter configs and his own config.

In general, I recommend checking out people's configs on GitHub. You can learn a lot by example.

[-] silmaril@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 8 months ago

Thank you very much for those links!

Generally I don't like video tutorials much - I prefer reading things in my own speed and being able to copy & paste stuff.
But only looking at the titles of those videos sounds promising enough to give them a try :-)
(I didn't yet have the time to watch any of them.)

One aspect I find interesting:

One look at the Misterio77 configs shows that the concept of flakes seems to be important. I have no idea what they are, but I can see that both youtubers have something about flakes as the second video in their NixOS playlists - looks like I should better learn about this concept soon :-)

[-] silmaril@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 8 months ago

Oh! Just found out that LibrePheonix accompanies each video with a blog article - that's nice 🙂

https://librephoenix.com/blog.html

[-] sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago

Once you have some foundational knowledge, I find more answers searching github with language:nix <some terms>. Usually I can find a few repos with an adjacent enough solution to deconstruct and apply to my setup.

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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024

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NixOS is a Linux distribution built on top of the Nix package manager. Its declarative configuration allows reliable system upgrades via several official channels of stability and size.

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