NixOS as My New Home?
I don’t know why I never included it in my distro-hopping months ago, but NixOS was not on the list that I tried. I really meant to try it out once, but alas, I just never did. So last week I rectified that and installed NixOS on my spare hard drive. The installation was just like any other distro install—select timezone, locale, disk to use, desktop environment to install, etc. I don’t recall the install taking very long either, but most distros don’t take much time anymore with modern hardware.
Once I made it into Nix, there was nothing new about what I saw. Standard SDDM look and feel with a standard KDE Plasma default look and feel once I was in. Where I started to notice the difference is when I inspected my path. It looks like this: /run/wrappers/bin /home/maurerit/.nix-profile/bin /nix/profile/bin /home/maurerit/.local/state/nix/profile/bin /etc/profiles/per-user/user/bin /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/bin /run/current-system/sw/bin. That kind of threw me for a loop. I knew Nix was different, but I figured they did things to unbreak the FHS so that standard Linux knowledge isn’t ALL thrown out the window, lol. Nope, the FHS is completely broken, rendering NixOS a thing all its own that also happens to run Linux, GNU Core utils, and FOSS tools.
I have a basic understanding of NixOS after having talked quite a bit with a buddy who used to run it and loved it, so I knew generally where to go. The manual desktop entry in the application menu is always a welcome addition as well, so I cracked that open and navigated to /etc/nixos and started editing the configuration.nix. This file is surprisingly short for something that defines an entire system. There’s quite a bit of magic going on though, as all you need to do to install KDE Plasma is to toggle one little property. Not much different than installing a meta package on Arch or Debian or any other distribution, I guess, but where it differs is that this isn’t just lost in some bash history somewhere or completely hidden by the installer. It’s all in configuration.nix and you can easily see what is in your system.
Here is my current config:
# Edit this configuration file to define what should be installed on
# your system. Help is available in the configuration.nix(5) man page
# and in the NixOS manual (accessible by running ‘nixos-help’).
{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
let
home-manager = builtins.fetchTarball https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-25.05.tar.gz;
in
{
imports =
[ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
./hardware-configuration.nix
(import "${home-manager}/nixos")
];
# Bootloader.
boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = true;
boot.loader.efi.canTouchEfiVariables = true;
# Use latest kernel.
boot.kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_latest;
networking.hostName = "maurer-nixos-lappy"; # Define your hostname.
# networking.wireless.enable = true; # Enables wireless support via wpa_supplicant.
# Configure network proxy if necessary
# networking.proxy.default = "http://user:password@proxy:port/";
# networking.proxy.noProxy = "127.0.0.1,localhost,internal.domain";
# Enable networking
networking.networkmanager.enable = true;
# Set your time zone.
time.timeZone = "America/New_York";
# Select internationalisation properties.
i18n.defaultLocale = "en_US.UTF-8";
i18n.extraLocaleSettings = {
LC_ADDRESS = "en_US.UTF-8";
LC_IDENTIFICATION = "en_US.UTF-8";
LC_MEASUREMENT = "en_US.UTF-8";
LC_MONETARY = "en_US.UTF-8";
LC_NAME = "en_US.UTF-8";
LC_NUMERIC = "en_US.UTF-8";
LC_PAPER = "en_US.UTF-8";
LC_TELEPHONE = "en_US.UTF-8";
LC_TIME = "en_US.UTF-8";
};
# Enable the X11 windowing system.
# You can disable this if you're only using the Wayland session.
services.xserver.enable = true;
# Enable the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment.
services.displayManager.sddm.enable = true;
services.desktopManager.plasma6.enable = true;
# Configure keymap in X11
services.xserver.xkb = {
layout = "us";
variant = "";
};
# Enable CUPS to print documents.
services.printing.enable = true;
# Enable sound with pipewire.
services.pulseaudio.enable = false;
security.rtkit.enable = true;
services.pipewire = {
enable = true;
alsa.enable = true;
alsa.support32Bit = true;
pulse.enable = true;
# If you want to use JACK applications, uncomment this
#jack.enable = true;
# use the example session manager (no others are packaged yet so this is enabled by default,
# no need to redefine it in your config for now)
#media-session.enable = true;
};
# Enable touchpad support (enabled default in most desktopManager).
# services.xserver.libinput.enable = true;
# Define a user account. Don't forget to set a password with ‘passwd’.
users.users.maurerit = {
isNormalUser = true;
description = "Matthew Maurer";
extraGroups = [ "networkmanager" "wheel" ];
uid = 1000;
shell = pkgs.fish;
};
home-manager.users.maurerit = { config, pkgs, ... }: {
home.packages = with pkgs; [
kdePackages.kate
fishPlugins.pure
];
programs.git = {
enable = true;
userEmail = "maurer.it@gmail.com";
userName = "Matthew Maurer";
};
home.file.".config/kwinrc".source = ./dotfiles/kwinrc;
home.file.".config/powerdevilrc".source = ./dotfiles/powerdevilrc;
home.file.".config/kcminputrc".source = ./dotfiles/kcminputrc;
home.file.".config/kscreenlockerrc".source = ./dotfiles/kscreenlockerrc;
home.file.".config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc".source = ./dotfiles/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc;
home.file.".config/plasmashellrc".source = ./dotfiles/plasmashellrc;
home.stateVersion = "25.05";
};
# Install firefox.
programs.firefox.enable = true;
programs.steam.enable = true;
programs.fish.enable = true;
programs.git.enable = true;
# Allow unfree packages
nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
# List packages installed in system profile. To search, run:
# $ nix search wget
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
discord
signal-desktop
protonup-qt
brave
fastfetch
fish
_1password-gui
#Development dependencies
h2
jetbrains.idea-ultimate
jetbrains.webstorm
jetbrains.datagrip
jetbrains.goland
jdk24
#System needs
nfs-utils
];
# Some programs need SUID wrappers, can be configured further or are
# started in user sessions.
# programs.mtr.enable = true;
# programs.gnupg.agent = {
# enable = true;
# enableSSHSupport = true;
# };
# List services that you want to enable:
# Enable the OpenSSH daemon.
# services.openssh.enable = true;
# Open ports in the firewall.
# networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ ... ];
# networking.firewall.allowedUDPPorts = [ ... ];
# Or disable the firewall altogether.
networking.firewall.enable = false;
# This value determines the NixOS release from which the default
# settings for stateful data, like file locations and database versions
# on your system were taken. It‘s perfectly fine and recommended to leave
# this value at the release version of the first install of this system.
# Before changing this value read the documentation for this option
# (e.g. man configuration.nix or on https://nixos.org/nixos/options.html).
system.stateVersion = "25.05"; # Did you read the comment?
}
One of the key segments is the part that starts with home-manager.users.maurerit, as this is a module that is intended to configure the home folders of users. This module is called Home Manager and I’m currently using it to put some config files in place for KDE, update my git config, and set up the pure fish config inside my home folder. I am still messing around with this module as people talk about it heavily and I feel like I’m just scratching the surface with my usage of it. One thing I want Home Manager to manage for me is the shell. I think it has options for fish specifically, so I want to get in there and get fish to display fastfetch when starting up. Other than that, I’m not sure what else I need to do to be happy with the install.
Speaking of being happy with the install, I was up and running with that config in just under a couple of hours. The documentation is really good—it leaves you hints in the config file via comments, and generally the experience is really cool. I was quite happy in the OS, surfing and using it like I normally do. I haven’t fully set up my development environment with a project and coded on the platform, but that is coming. I don’t have plans to distro-hop much more on the ASUS laptop as I do want to give NixOS a chance, so I might actually start using it completely just to see if it’s for me. I think what’s holding me back is that I’m not super excited about it. Sure, it was cool and it has some cool features, but it doesn’t exactly get me excited to use it. So while I’d be happy to use it if it were my only option, I am really thinking that Arch is for me—and specifically CachyOS.
I’ll keep these pages posted with my NixOS adventures.