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

That sounds like something I should try, too.

Currently I'm using Linux Mint and I also have a dotfiles repo, so that sounds quite similar to your case.

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

Yes! That's the correct way to write this, thank you! 😊

And it's already set inside /etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix after installing inside a VM.

I had an additional layer 8 problem - clipboard sharing doesn't work until it's enabled in the VirtualBox host , too 🙃

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

Thank you very much!

nix.settings.extra-experimental-features = [ “nix-command” “flakes” ];
seems to actually work in my setup.

And it's nice to know that I can make do with one --extra-experimental-features argument for several features at once.

May I be so bold as to ask a follow-up question that doesn't have much to do with this one?

What do I have to do to get Virtualbox Guest Additions to work on NixOS? Not having a shared clipboard is driving me crazy ;-)

Once again everything I found on the internet leads to errors during sudo nixos rebuild. I hope it's just another case of knowing the correct names for the actual packages or options to use.

Can someone help me here?

4

So I tried to follow some tutorial about flakes, but it seems these are extra-experimental still.

I am using NixOS 23.11 with Nix 2.18.1 in a VM (those are the most recent stable versions, right?).

Trying around I already found out that instead of eg. nix flake update I have to use --extra-experimental-features two times to get this simple command:

nix --extra-experimental-features nix-command --extra-experimental-features flakes flake update

Searching the web I found several different things that people put into their /etc/nixos/configuration.nix to enable this globally, but none of those worked for me. I assume there is still a way to do this - can someone please tell me the correct syntax for Nix 2.18.1?

What makes things worse is that I cannot start playing around with home-manager and flakes, because home-manager switch flake . seems to use nix flake internally, which leads to errors instead of results.

[-] 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

[-] 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

Currently I am playing around in a virtual machine to get to know NixOS and find out what I can do with it.

I'd like to set up a usable everyday desktop configuration with "everything".

This includes typical desktop applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice ... development tools like Git, PyCharm, VS Code, ... all those little things I need to work productively like Nextcloud desktop client, KeePassXC, Zim and many more.

And I'd like to have zsh as my default shell with my own custom theme and some dotfiles for different applications that currently reside in a git repo that I clone to every machine I use.

I know this is a lot and I don't expect to get this all up and running in an afternoon.

It's just that I find it very hard to find the next bit of information I need. For example I found snippets to put into my configuration.nix long before I found out where to find this file (/etc/nixos/configuration.nix).

From the answers so far I gather that there really is no (official or unofficial) documentation to tell NixOs newbies how to start, so everyone just makes do with the things they find.

So I think I'll just fight my way through this jungle, too ;-)
The price that's waiting at the other and seems to be totally worth it!

If anyone has valuable tips or links to help me achieve something from the things I listed, those would be very much appreciated! :-)

[-] silmaril@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 8 months ago

I know what you mean - the problem with this approach is that things might work, but I am using it not in the way it's intended, because I didn't understand the underlying concepts.. But I cannot search for concepts of which I don't know they exist...

12

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?

silmaril

joined 2 years ago