this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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NixOS

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NixOS is a Linux distribution built on top of the Nix package manager. Its declarative configuration allows reliable system upgrades via several official channels of stability and size.

This community discusses NixOS, Nix, and everything related.

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NixOS Home Manager suggested Desktop (infosec.pub)
submitted 1 year ago by vpz@infosec.pub to c/nixos@infosec.pub
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I want to learn and experiment with fully configuring a single user NixOS installation that is declarative. I've found quite a bit on the NixOS system-land side, but when I go into Home Manager user-land I'm not seeing very much around configuring the Desktop. I usually use XFCE but in trying to work with it I kept running across posts about how it wasn't well supported. So I tried KDE but found the same.What is the best supported Desktop with Home Manager? Or do folks just do the basics with nix stuff, and end up pulling in the rest of the config info into the home directory (like from a repo) as a work-around? Basically use nix stuff to retrieve files and put them into the correct destinations.

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[–] pol@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

KDE Plasma is amazing...

[–] vpz@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, after switching to the NixOS KDE desktop it is very nice looking desktop environment out of the box. Nice than the NixOS Xfce setup. I was also pointed to plasma manager to try moving some settings into my .nix files.

[–] pol@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Feel free to grab inspiration from https://github.com/drupol/nixos-x260

[–] vpz@infosec.pub 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you. These examples show more settings than I've found anywhere.

[–] Klaymore@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I enable the desktop environment through the normal nixos module and it works great, but I use KDE and it doesn't have declarative configuration support through nixos so all the dotfiles are managed like normal. I've heard GNOME has better support if you want to set the configs through NixOS or Home-Manager whatever, but I haven't used it so idk.

[–] vpz@infosec.pub 0 points 1 year ago

I asked this question on Mastodon and got some helpful answers. I haven't had the time to try anything yet, but here are some links. KDE: https://github.com/pjones/plasma-manager Gnome: https://hoverbear.org/blog/declarative-gnome-configuration-in-nixos/ Xfce may be similar to the Gnome article but using xfconf and xfconf-query to get the settings to apply. Again I haven't tried any of these suggestions. This is a summary of the info I got elsewhere.