First look at Nixos

Yesterday I pulled an unused Proliant ML310 from storage and fitted it with an unused 80 GB SSD (yes it is quite old). I downloaded the nixos iso, wrote and USB stick using balana etcher on my mac and soon enough the installer was running.

The installer look very solid and was very easy to use. So before I knew the thing was installed and booting.

There was a minor annoyance where the default install does not have vi available but also does not hint what editors are available. Some searching later I was editing my /etc/nixos/configuration.nix with nano like a pro and soon enough I was able to tune the system to my needs with a nixos-rebuild switch. I now have a single configuration file that describes 99,5% of the packages and tools I need on my regular desktop machine. No ansible or other post install setup tooling needed. This is really nice.

Sure this is just the beginning of it, as now I have to find out how to properly manage the configurations in my home dir etc. Let's see how far I can get with home manager. The nix concept is nice and seems to work decently. Now to find out how well it will behave over time.

I was tooting about this while doing so and got some really helpful responses from the Fediverse. Totally cool! :-)