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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Getting started with NixOS - looking for tutorials (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 7 months ago by silmaril@discuss.tchncs.de to c/nixos@infosec.pub

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I heard a lot about the concepts of nix and NixOS and I'd love to try it.

After installing the VirtualBox demo, I keep getting stuck with every tiny step I take, though.

So I was wondering if there are any tutorials for beginners that you can recommend?

I couldn't find anything on the internet - everything that looks like a tutorial presumes a lot of things everybody seems to know about nix, so no need to explain those.

Where can I find those explanations to make the first baby steps with NixOS?

To put it in other words: Where is NixOS for dummies?

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[–] sajran@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

I've been playing with NixOS in spare time for a few weeks now and I'm afraid I don't have a very good news for you. It looks like the learning curve is just very steep. It took me quite a lot of time to get to the point where I have any idea what I'm doing. Some beginner friendly resources which helped me:

Vimjoyer videos on YT,
LibrePheonix videos on YT,
Misterio77 Nix starter configs and his own config.

In general, I recommend checking out people's configs on GitHub. You can learn a lot by example.

[–] silmaril@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Thank you very much for those links!

Generally I don't like video tutorials much - I prefer reading things in my own speed and being able to copy & paste stuff.
But only looking at the titles of those videos sounds promising enough to give them a try :-)
(I didn't yet have the time to watch any of them.)

One aspect I find interesting:

One look at the Misterio77 configs shows that the concept of flakes seems to be important. I have no idea what they are, but I can see that both youtubers have something about flakes as the second video in their NixOS playlists - looks like I should better learn about this concept soon :-)

[–] silmaril@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Oh! Just found out that LibrePheonix accompanies each video with a blog article - that's nice 🙂

https://librephoenix.com/blog.html

[–] sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago

Once you have some foundational knowledge, I find more answers searching github with language:nix <some terms>. Usually I can find a few repos with an adjacent enough solution to deconstruct and apply to my setup.