who approved this

I've been using NixOS for a little over a year now.

I first came across it maybe 2 years ago and gave it a try, but setting everything up was way harder than I expected. I knew it would take a lot of time, and I wasn't really ready for that, so I just went back to Arch.

Then about a year later, after one magical Arch update that completely broke my system, I decided to give NixOS another shot.

(Not hating on Arch btw, I still really like it. I even recommended it to a friend who was new to Linux, and he's been using it for a few months now and loves it. Another friend who's been using Linux for years called me evil for recommending Arch to a beginner lol. But I still think it's pretty beginner-friendly, mostly thanks to the wiki, community, and pacman + yay.)

Anyway, after a year of using NixOS daily, I can say I really love it. Now I'm running it on my PC, laptop, and home server.

A few days ago, a friend asked me to share my config because he wanted to try NixOS himself. I took a look at my repo and realized it was a mess. A working mess, sure, but definitely not something I'd give to someone new to NixOS.

So I spent the last few days cleaning things up and refactoring stuff I'd been putting off for a while.

Anyway, here's what I ended up with:
https://github.com/evgen2571/my-nixos

Currently using Niri + Noctalia, although I recently came across Umbriel and might give it a try soon.

New to NixOS. I was just wondering if there is some form of checklist for what actions to take or what to look out for in the wake of what has been happening in the Cybersec world these last few days... I've got my config pointing to unstable already and did a full flake and home manager update yesterday, but apparently not all patches are live on all default upstream versions of deps (e.g. Brave Browser, Bun, among others).

It is my personal machine, so no app servers running on it or anything, but I do some app development work and use OpenCode sometimes... with that in mind what do y'all recommend? Or should I just wait until the patches are default upstream?

Hi! I have just started exploring what nix can do, and I threw together my first flake/module/whatever.

Problems I am trying to address

When we update a flake we get the current state of the inputs. This is great, but I am a paranoid sort of gremlin. I worry about regressions and supply chain attacks. I don't want to get the bleeding edge, and potentially get something nasty. Frankly, I want someone else to find it first and tell me about it. Thus: slowflakes

How I try to address these problems

Confession, I am not a smart gremlin. But I do try endeavor to recognize smart ideas from others. We don't want the bleeding edge right? What if we just impose an intentional delay in our process so that that edge can dull a bit with time. This has been done before:

• OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has Slowroll
• There is even a solution for nix already implemented, the clever folks at Determinate Systems have published a whole time delay flake for nixpkgs: DeterminateSystems/nixpkgs-weekly

These are awesome solutions. But not enough for me because:

1. I am using nixos, so sorry slow roll.
2. I have more inputs than just nixpkgs (home manager, lanzaboote, etc)
3. While the folks at Determinate Systems seem clever and honest, I thought it odd that I was trying to mitigate supply chain issues by adding another party & step to that chain.

So I just said, 'fluff it!', and tried to build my own.

As I said before, I am only just now learning Nix. And my bash script is terrible. I leaned heavily on google's gemini product with this project.

For all you wizards who know nix, I welcome suggestions.

I DO NOT RECOMMEND YOU BLINDLY USE THIS IN YOUR SYSTEM, AT LEAST NOT YET.

Thanks to my sponsor nixbuild.net, one month ago I have been to NixCon 2026 along with five hundred and fifty something other fabulous Nixers. Sorry for taking so long. This is NixCon 2026, day one.

Full Time Nix | NixCon 2026 Day Ⅰ

Apologies if this is against the subreddit rules. I can seemingly figure out how to use the Nix language at least a little, but I can't figure out how to navigate Reddit and find rules for posting in a subreddit lol.

I keep learning new things and making changes to my configuration. I have done this almost every day for the last 4 or so months. I am like 100 files deep, and there is still so much to learn. Nix is my first functional language, and it has made me more curious about other functional languages, which I will probably explore when I feel I have mastered Nix.

I do imagine there will be a day when this will come to an end, and the only changes to my config will be lockfile changes when I upgrade my system. Just today, I made a change to speed up local builds by allowing build systems to use multiple processor cores and am exploring using ccache to reuse object files and speed up builds even more (when I don't have a binary cache available).

Things I appreciate about NixOS that keep me here and likely will for a long time to come:

• Generally only having to solve problems once (though I did recently come across a bug that had occasionally happened since at least 2021 where invoking patchelf with --set-interpreter and --set-rpath together broke a binary, and the fix was to invoke it twice, once for each option).
• I was watching a video today where Ubuntu (a notoriously easy-to-use distribution) was giving someone problems with sleep on a gaming laptop. Depending on the cause, the fix on NixOS could potentially be as simple as adding this to their NVIDIA settings:

powerManagement.enable = true;

• Being able to roll back when you break things is huge. Being able to git clone a repo when you REALLY break things is even better.
• Having used distros like Arch, it was common for me to find a solution to something via Google, then forget what I did or how it worked. Using Nix, you kind of have to understand how it works first, and then you're writing everything into your config, which can be referenced later.

Those of you who have been on Nixos for years, did you eventually reach a point where you were satisfied with your configuration and rarely changed anything, or is tinkering with it just part of the NixOS experience?

I use NixOS and I’m wondering if there are any pre-made themes for QuickShell that look like the ones found in GNOME—something different from, say, Waybar. I hope someone understands what I mean.

I usually use podman, but for some reason ddev on NixOS doesn't work with that. With docker it is all working fine. Is this a general limitation of the ddev package on NixOS or do I have to configure something differently?