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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

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pxc·

That's just for Nix, not a way of installing NixOS.

NixOS itself has had a graphical installer for years, though.

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You're misunderstanding, and it's a great opportunity for me to clarify:

I want a graphical installer for applications within NixOS.

Currently NixOS applications are added by editing the configuration.nix, with more specific tooling avaliable via flakes and home-manager. We agree that this is cool and good.

What I want for consumer use is NixOS, with an interal graphical installer that handles updating configurations in the background; ideally forming a no-terminal-necessary UX for consumer users.

Ah, yes, I see now. I think a NixOS configuration is best managed as text, but I can see now how code generation could potentially bridge that gap. I'm not currently confident in the ability of LLMs to do this, but I do think that a kind of "NixOS IDE", perhaps with a some GUI elements and writing to some constrained files is a good idea.

Once upon a time, Snowflake OS was working on this, but I don't think the project is very active anymore.

I see your point for technical users, what I'm imagining is something where I install NixOS, and then download LibreOffice via a GUI, as is done on Windows/Mac/Most Linux tbh

I don't think an LLM is required here; for a very significant subset of nixpkgs I think updating the configuration.nix is a deterministic process.

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