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Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

You're looking at a solid 10-20 hours of hacking stuff together to get a decent working system, and you still won't understand a good 80% of what you copied from various repos.

I've been using NixOS for a year now, and I have a definite love/hate relationship. Many times I miss the simplicity of Arch, where I understood _everything_ about my system and how it was configured.

NixOS is like learning everything all over again, but in a weird, poorly documented language+standard lib that nothing else uses.

I think when you are super comfortable with it, is when it becomes truly amazing. But that takes a lot of dedicated time and effort.

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Yes, it's extremely powerful once you truly understand Nix.

There are efforts to improve documentation, but it still is lacking (I think the biggest problem is that Nix is so big, not just the OS but it can be utilized as a build system).

Just with NixOS is not exactly clear how can you for example build your custom image.

I think https://nix.dev/ is approaching the documentation from the right direction.

There are also many pieces that people built that you need to find.

For example some things that I found accidentally:

* https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix

* https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle

* https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

Unfortunately those side projects often have even worse documentation.

If you want to build custom images just use https://github.com/nix-community/nixos-generators It's documentation is on point.

Would it be possible to add a minimalistic image that contains app, kernel and essential packages? Like what you would get when building a docker container or using the not-os repo that I mentioned earlier.

I think having mini images would be awesome.

You might like: https://nixery.dev/

e.g. if you want a Nix container with a shell environment, git, and htop:

    docker run -ti nixery.dev/shell/git/htop bash

This is where I'm sitting right now. I'm trying out Void Linux on my laptop and it's just so simple. I love that I understand my system. I look at Nix as a language and I just have no idea what is going on.

What I'd really like, as a learning resource, is a "Nix for apt/yum users" or a "Nix for Ansible" users guide. There is the cheat sheet (https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Cheatsheet) but it's just not enough.

For example, I wanted to just... create an arbitrary directory in my home directory (~/workspace). Does Home Manager do this? If so, how? Do I just have a shell script that is called within a package? That seems excessive. Is this not a use case for Nix? It looks like it can do arbitrary tasks across the system but the documentation is so bogged down with theory that it takes forever to find practical applications.

> For example, I wanted to just... create an arbitrary directory in my home directory (~/workspace). Does Home Manager do this? If so, how? Do I just have a shell script that is called within a package? That seems excessive. Is this not a use case for Nix? It looks like it can do arbitrary tasks across the system but the documentation is so bogged down with theory that it takes forever to find practical applications.

You are definitively trying to do too much at the same time. Before using Home-Manager (that is a community project, it is not endorsed by NixOS except by allowing to be hosted on the nix-community group on GitHub), I stayed at two years playing with only NixOS. It is only after I got comfortable with Nix and NixOS that I decided to migrate my configuration to Home-Manager. Not saying that you need that much time to use HM, just that HM assumes that you're know a reasonable good amount about Nix and NixOS.

So I would say, start with less: try NixOS first, it is kinda easy to use compared to other "advanced" Linux distros like Arch and Void. The easy things are really easy, the hard things can be really hard at first but I don't think you need to know much about Nix to be proeficient on NixOS nowadays. Also yeah, you will need to search some things, but since the scope is reduced it is easier to find answers.

My advice would be (per the other person here) to ignore home-manager when you're getting started, and then, when you're ready, treat it as a dotfiles manager on steroids.

I've never used it to manage visible directories in my ~/, but for ~/.gitconfig? Absolutely :).

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