silverbluep
Joined 2 months ago
Joined 2 months ago
- nix primarily is the package manager; basically can be installed anywhere. The big thing is; it builds packages to /nix/ , keeps software there and all the dependencies are done through symlinks to packages in the nix store - nix is also the functional programming language that the nix package manager can take as input - nixos is a framework for writing a system configuration in the nix language; and produces a working linux distribution; integrated with nix. - home-manager is copying the nixos framework, but brings it to userspace management.
The biggest issue getting into home-manager from outside is; it's high learning curve and due to being in the nix ecosystem; there is a lot of concepts that it uses (modules, configuration in functional paradigm) that is a whole lot to learn from 0 just to manage system config, but once things click together, it is wonderful.
To add to what you have found; there is also https://github.com/numtide/system-manager which brings NixOS' declarative system configuration to other distros as well, but I haven't personally used it.
Technically you could use plasma-manager on any distro; you install nix, and use home-manager standalone. I think with KDE; you would want to skip package management, but doable; I used to do with arch.
I guess depends on what you already use for configuration management. Bear in mind; a lot of KDE apps do store state information (window size etc.) inside the config directory and there wasn't an easy way to disentangle config from state when I used to manage my config with a git repo.
I need banking and bunch of vendor related apps. I need play store for them; so not full on f-droid repos. But close-ish when it comes to phone functionality.
The laptop quality is great; great sound, battery lasts forever compared to mine (framework). Userspace tools and UI is terrible and have no control over but the hardware and the software integration is top notch. (I live in the terminal, and have nix-darwin to bring my existing setup to mac so it's not jarring most of the time)
Won't look back when I can transition back to linux full time; I'll be so happy. But I can see why people go with apple products. I really hope that ARM laptops become a regular thing.
Not trying to sing praises; i think opencode is doing a bunch of weird stuff too but it's not codex level.