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#declare distro - #2 (what the fuck is a derivation)
2024-05-30 10:19:00 -0400 - written by JetpackJackson (edited 2024-05-30 00:00)
My foray into the world of Nix. I decided to try out NixOS in a VM, and I joined the Nix/NixOS Discord server at one point during this. When I couldn’t get Sway to work in the VM, I decided to create a set of partitions on my backup SSD. I had to first backup the backups, clear the drive, partition, and then put my data back on the non-Nixified partition.
Before:
sdb
|___ sdb1 (backup)
After:
sdb
|___ sdb1 (backup partition (now named "linuxbox"))
|___ sdb2 (NixOS swap?)
|___ sdb3 (nix)
|___ sdb4 (main NixOS partition)
After getting the system installed, now I had to configure it. This was rather tricky, having never seen Nix before and facing a wiki that was a barren wasteland compared to the all-mighty Arch Wiki. But the Discord community was very helpful, and eventually even helped me package a Python module for Nixpkgs! I felt alive. I was constantly keeping my nix dotfiles up to date, booting into
greyfox with the external SSD connected to tinker. I learned about Nix shells, allowing me to modularize my NixOS and Arch configs, and to set up development environments. I was so excited to be immersed in this.
But then, I slowly lost interest in the opinionated ways that Nix used. I didn’t want to convert all my dotfiles to nixlang, so that they would be portable to Arch. I also worried about being able to manage software for school; if something needed to be installed a certain way, I would rather stick with Arch for that. I loved the concepts, home-manager’s management of dotfiles was neat (and I eventually found a replacement for Arch in the form of GNU Stow), but something just made me not want to boot it up anymore.
And then The Drama happened.
And now I wasn’t sure what to do. I had made so many development environments, I had talked about Nix to my friends, and now I didn’t even want to touch it. What was I to do now?
Then I learned about a potentially even more opinionated distro, that prides itself as being liberating, dependable, and hackable.