Hello, hope your all well?
So I’m about to install NixOS on my primary workstation. I’ve been tinkering on an old laptop, learning flakes, getting to grips with home-manager and the nix commands especially garbage collection.
So the configuration.nix I’ve created on my laptop, isn’t all the tooling I’ll use on my workstation and honestly, I can remember half the stuff I’ve installed or tools I install along the way.
So here is my actual question is there anything like a nix config generator, where I can cherry pick apps, services and utilities?
You are the configuration.nix generator.
Thought as much, Oh well it would have been nice if it was possible to select, devops engineer working with .net core and java microservices and Azure functions. Then you’d get all the basics in one bundle docker, azure-cli,ps, .net sdk, openjdk,kubectl,k9s and then build on that.
I fully accept that many people have many use-cases but there is a lot of commonality, Ubuntu knocks out things like DAW, Kali has a load of preloaded tools Sci linux again comes with pre-loading.
The graphical installer let’s you chose a DE so y’know a basic workflow bundle.
My first week with NixOs I had to clear out 30 odd generations because I was doing oh! yeh, and this
Wow that repo is brilliant, thank you so much
What is the issue? What does your current config look like?
Correct me if I’m wrong. So you’re worried about not being able to recall the names of all the tools you will need, at a time when you are about to install nixOS on your main workstation?
If there was ever an OS in existence where it doesn’t matter that you remember everything from the get go or that you need to do things “in the correct order” lest you you mess something up, it’s nixOS.
That being said, you can use the following search pages to cherry pick to your heart’s content:
And if you find something interesting but you’re unsure exactly how to use it, search for it like so.
It’s not NixOS I’m bothered about, it’s all the stuff I’ve installed on Arch over the last few years - like yq, I use it once in a blue moon.
The main reason I’m switching to NixOS is that it has configuration.nix , flakes and home-manager. Put it like this a while back I struggled to get wasm containers working in docker, I did a lot of faffing including g I stalling extra binfmt’s different wasm runtime, only to realise that wasm wasn’t available in the version of docker I was using, so I installed beta, broke a whole load of stuff.
My core use case is if I break stuff then I can go back a gen or two. Which is what I’ve been trying out on an old spare laptop.
I’m pretty much upto speed on searching stable and u stable packages and option but thank anyway
Are you keeping nix config in git? Between generations and source control you should be covered.
This is a good point. You could probably write a little tool that finds installed AURs, pacman, yum, apt packages and tries to find them in nixpkgs.