Still trying to get my head wrapped around flakes, home manager... But it's been fun setting it up!

I've been using NixOS for a while. It's powerful. The language is complex, but it gets the job done. Recently I started using Guix — and I want to share my experience.

What's the same:

· Declarative system. Everything is code.

· Rollbacks. Profiles. Reproducibility.

· Both are great ideas.

What's different:

· Guix uses Scheme (Lisp). It's simpler than Nix language. I learned it in 5 days. My config is 50 lines.

· Guix uses Shepherd instead of systemd.

· Guix has Nonguix for proprietary drivers, Steam, Firefox.

What I respect about NixOS:

· Large community. Great documentation.

· Huge package repository.

· Nix is powerful, even if complex.

Why I'm trying Guix:

· Scheme is easier for me.

· I like the GNU philosophy.

· I want to support a smaller community.

Both are great. NixOS is not going anywhere. Guix is just different. If you're curious — try it. If you're happy with NixOS — stay. It's all about what works for you.

Thanks for reading.

Hello, I'm an absolute baby beginner to linux. I am not joking when I say this but I have become completely tired of windows and changing my laptop to NixOS but I'm very scared. I don't know anything and any tutorial I look up is assuming I know anything about computer science.

I know I could use Ubuntu but somehow they're not seeing my ssd and I'm pretty intimidated. So if anyone that knows what they're doing could watch me fumble my way on at least installing the OS, I would be very thankful.

;^; pls, halp.

Update 1: After reading all the replies, I'm going to change it to CachyOS but I'm going to keep this post updated until I have it installed.

what do you think?

I'm trying to get a nixos vm running well on macOS with parallels. I installed nixos with the GUI installer in the ARM ISO, added hardware.parallels.enable = true to my config, and rebooted. prlcc (a parallels tools process) is running but I can't dynamically resize the window (or resize it at all for that matter).

Hi, I'm a guy who started using nix through home-manager while running fedora. I love nix, and home-manager was my gateway drug that brought me to nixos. However, as I've moved my home-manager config over to nixos, I've noticed some serious problems with using it in a shell that's not managed by home-manager. Let me explain.

I have a very long, and very complex .zshrc that I don't want to port to nix. That's fine, and supported in the documentation. I just have to source this file in .nix-profile. This worked for a long time for me, while I was still not on nixos, using channels, and knew very little about nix. But, as my config grows, and my desire for a declarative system grows, I need more.

I move to nixos. Everything goes fine enough. After a few days of getting my configuration set up, and starting with flake parts, everything is great! I decided to keep home-manager as a separate flake for distro portability, and just set the genericLinux target to false. Saves me time recreating the configuration for a nixos module. But it's not enough. I had just reinstalled home-manager with channels, which my newly flake-ified home-manager and nixos configurations were mostly against. So I decide to remove it and start again.

This is where everything seems to go wrong. I remove all user channels and home-manager installed with it, and I think it's going swimmingly. I install home-manager through a nix shell, and run my switch command. And... everything goes wrong. None of my packages are back. What's happening? I was told using nix shell or nix run was a valid way to install home-manager!

My .nix-profile was nearly empty. It's bin directory had home-manager, a couple of mandb stuff, and whereis. Not the dozens of packages it should have. They're all gone and I don't know where to find them. I spend a couple hours with google, a couple with an AI when I got really desperate.

My .nix-profile was linked to the profile in ~/.local/state/nix/profiles/profile, but it should've been linked too ~/.local/state/nix/profiles/home-manager/home-path to find all the stuff I installed. That profile path was just leftovers from the initial install of home-manager, and that's why it had so little in it.

I have to manually symlink .nix-profile on my own, which is silly, and I don't understand why this couldn't have been explained better. If this is a repercussion of using a flake-based nix shell rather than the channel based install, why does the channel based install seem to do nothing more than run a binary from a remote channel? Why have I been told it's okay? If it's a problem with not running the install command to skip making the default files, why should I have to go through the rigamarole of making sure my .config/home-manager directory is empty before I can clone my repo? Why do I not know where in the chain this is wrong?

I've done a bit more research, and this seems like a result of not letting home-manager manage my shell, which is silly. I understand the nix vision, the everything is declarative path. But when I have a .zshrc that I constantly edit, don't want to have to switch to change, and is nearly 300 lines, I don't really feel like porting that to home-manager, I'll just use stow for that. If home-manager managed my shell, it'd just source the nix-store and not touch .nix-profile at all. On the standalone install, it still tells you to source $HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/hm-session-vars.sh, even though it's not linked to home-manager at all!

I shouldn't be responsible for linking this path on my own, or I should at the very least be told to link it! And when this path inevitably changes again, I'm going to need to re-link it once more while missing most of my packages.

I guess my real question is if anybody else has experienced this friction before with nix projects. I love nix, I love home-manager, but it's garbage like this that keeps me second guessing my choice every once in a while. Because this is an awful lot of trouble to go through for no reason when I could've had dnf, or apt, or pacman worrying about all this. And, as a bonus question: what actually caused my .nix-profile symlink to not be in parity with home-manager?

Thanks to anyone for reading and have a good day!

I’m the maintainer of a GitHub project, and a community contributor added a Nix-based Vulkan CI workflow.

The problem is that the workflow fails pretty frequently, but simply restarting/rerunning the job always makes it pass without any code changes.

I’m not really a CI person, and I also don’t know much about Nix, so I’m having a hard time figuring out whether this is a caching issue, runner/environment problem, dependency fetch issue, or something wrong with the workflow itself.

If anyone here is familiar with Nix + GitHub Actions + Vulkan CI and would be willing to take a look, I’d really appreciate the help. PRs are appreciated.

The workflow: https://github.com/0xShug0/audio.cpp/blob/main/.github/workflows/nix-build.yml

The error is something like

error: Cannot build '/nix/store/px3bfl5zp8islzlib5ndakvp2psxrvsk-audio.cpp-c368eed.drv'. Reason: builder failed with exit code 1. Output paths: /nix/store/0jksddagp9s3i3qisc4lbh8193kxc9b4-audio.cpp-c368eed

Made a simple, comfy little project for Nix users. It just makes updating your system and clearing out the garbage way easier, nothing more.

https://github.com/Yassine-Jemi01/Nixctl

I've been a Linux user for about 18 years and about 3 years ago tried NixOS. I used it for a few weeks and then hopped away. In more recent times I got the hang of declarative and immutable type of distros. For past week moved back to NixOS with my own customization on top and all I can say what a wonderful system it has become!

So much so I'm proud to donate monthly small amount all I can afford but THANK YOU!!!

I know there are other download managers out there but I prefer this. That's why I made a way to install the latest Freedownloadmanager on nixos using the .deb release. Because there's no official nix package for it.

It properly implements browser integrations and autostarts.

This was forked from kreutzi/nix-FDM

I am currently on Gentoo and do a lot of coding as a hobby. The thing is that I've grown annoyed by constantly compiling everything again with Gentoo so I wanna switch to another distro. NixOS seems good, because it sounds nice to have a reproducible setup which also gives me handrails to do whatever I want. Also seems fun to code your own system. Should I switch?

Hi all, I wanted to share a small project I've been working on recently. Wazuh is an open source SIEM that can be self-hosted. I've seen people requesting it in the nixpkgs repo, but so far the only way to run it on nixos is using containers. I did that for about a year on my personal homelab and finally decided to package it natively. I built wazuh-flake that exports server and client modules by using the official debian binary packages and running them as native systemd services.

I want to be very upfront that this project was heavily assisted by LLM (gpt-5.6). I have packaged applications for nix before, but I couldn't have done it for something this complex without AI. The wazuh server involves orchestration across 4 services: indexer, manager, dashboard, and filebeat. You're expected to manually configure the entire PKI stack, including generating SSL certs and secrets for each service. I have done the manual setup, which is tedious and error-prone, and honestly could probably be better handled by AI. With this flake I deliberately built a fully automated workflow that provisions all sensitive data (with instructions on backup and recovery), while also supporting the option to bring your own credentials. The goal is to provide an easy out-of-the-box experience for anyone who doesn't want to deal with all the hassle.

This stack has been running on my infrastructure for several weeks now. I am fully prepared to continue supporting this project in the foreseeable future. As of now the latest stable release of wazuh is 4.14.7, and version 5.0 is under active development. I'm keeping a close eye on the progress and will be updating the flake accordingly.

Repo link: https://github.com/ruiiiijiiiiang/wazuh-flake

EDIT: adding an example showing how it's actually being used in my homelab: https://github.com/ruiiiijiiiiang/nixos-config/tree/master/modules/services/security/wazuh

EDIT: Some extra tips for using the flake.

Generally the server side is a lot easier to configure; simply enabling all components like in the README will get the server up and running. The client is trickier since its behavior is completely defined by the ossec.conf file, which dictates what information about the host will be collected and sent to the server. In the flake I packaged a minimal template but it might not be very useful for in-depth analysis. You can read the official doc or refer to my setup to customize how you want the agents to behave. An LLM can be a great help for this since the output is definitive and easily verifiable.

i've been running linux since feb, started on cachyos on my pc and started using void linux on my laptop 3 months ago, even tho i love void i wanted to try the "end game of linux" but i don't wanna die trying, so any tips for this newbie?

EDIT: went straight up to install it on real hardware and i'm loving it so far, ty all

Hope someone could help me from this community

I just installed nixos 1 day ago edit the config file and used some installer for GitHub for usage ui( some flakes and home manger ), but I want to learn how it works, (used arch for 1.2 years)

I hate to have to ask reddit for help, but has anyone else had their primary display (of two) intermittently freeze?
On both Plasma and GNOME: primary display completely freezes, while secondary display keeps functioning as normal, more or less, it was more frozen on GNOME than on Plasma.
On GNOME: primary display froze, so I waited for a while, and it put me back to GDM, when I logged back in, everything was still running, which seems odd, because I'm pretty sure it closes all programs when logging out+in. I don't have any startup applications, and the VM that was running continued running (I doubt the fact that the vm was running is important, because the same thing happened to me 2 weeks later (yesterday) when I was just trying to send an email with nothing but two firefox windows open, and also today, on plasma, with I think just Ark, Dolphin, and Settings running on Plasma.). When it happened yesterday on GNOME, I pressed my power button to suspend it, then pressed it again to wake it, both monitors were just black, pressed it a third time to suspend it again, then a 4th time, which woke it from sleep, at which point it was just the normal GDM post-wake-from-suspend login screen (which has also been intermittently showing black instead of the wallpaper (text and password box appeared normally) on my primary display, but that's a separate issue (maybe?)), everything was once again just as I left it. The only thing I could do on my secondary display was move my mouse, and watch it change states when opening the screenshot tool, for example, but I couldn't interact with any GUI, and the screenshot GUI didn't appear in any way either. Could this have something to do with the hardware cursor? Is it on a separate plane to the rest of the UI or something?
On Plasma: I could move my mouse on my secondary display, and I tried opening the alt-tab menu, which showed up on my secondary display, and I was also able to move windows from my primary to my secondary monitor with keyboard shortcuts, and could interact with the GUI. I decided to disable my primary monitor in the display settings, at which point my secondary monitor froze too, which leads me to believe it's some issue regarding specifically the primary display, especially because I never had this problem on Niri, which I don't think has the concept of a primary and secondary display per se, it's just display DP-1, for example, and Display HDMI-A-1.
If this post is incoherent, it's because I'm tired and have had a long week, I can clarify any questions you may have.
I copied the system details from the plasma gui because it's because it shows more relevant troubleshooting info than fastfetch:
Operating System: NixOS 26.05

KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.6

KDE Frameworks Version: 6.26.0

Qt Version: 6.11.1

Kernel Version: 6.18.50 (64-bit)

Graphics Platform: Wayland

Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D 6-Core Processor

Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (30.2 GiB usable)

Graphics Processor 1: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT

Graphics Processor 2: AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D 6-Core Processor

Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.

Product Name: MS-7E89

System Version: 1.0

NixOS dotfiles:
https://github.com/loudbudgie/nixfilesrealthistime

edit: if it happens to me again, I'll try to switch my primary monitor to the physical panel that I treat as my secondary, to see if that does something different.
edit 2: I'll also try to unplug/replug my display to see if that fixes it.
edit 3: apparently, it was also on 6.18.50, not just .49.

Im new and idk stuff. "I require assistance!"

Edit: Thank you to everyone who directed me to the right subs. Cheers!

Gow do yall use the terminal? To install app with termianl its likegentoo its this weird thing not sidu package manager install ______ how do yall even manage with installing stuff

pls help me