I've installed NixOS in my laptop -a Thinkpad x280- for my very first time, and the installation process was pretty straightforward.
Everything is working as expected after some tweaking: X11, power management, acpi -including the backlight-, the touchpad, suspend, audio, camera and all of my applications are working fine with the (almost) same configuration as I had in my previous Arch Linux system.
After a week working with NixOS, still is "a stranger" distro to me because there are something "weird things" like non-standard directories (and everything is "packed") in the /nix path and there are some "concepts" around the configuration, which can be splited into more files and also some concepts like flakes and home-manager configurations, which makes sense to me if you want to perform post configurations into your dotfiles and declare all the custom parameters for your tool chain.
NixOS is like a sort of ansible/chef tools integrated with the operating system and this is a very cool concept.
This is an experiment anyway, I'm still learning a lots of new concepts and it's is a long way to run. Still, I'm thinking on try another desktop installation but with Wayland and with the sway echosystem. Also I want to tweak again the configuration in order to perform a new installation but with encrypted filesystems and start using my Yubikey, but that's another history...
This is my current running configuration.nix file (use at your own risk!):
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
imports =
[ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
./hardware-configuration.nix
];
boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = true;
boot.loader.efi.canTouchEfiVariables = true;
boot.kernelParams = [ "quiet" "ipv6.disable=1" "i915.enable_dpcd_backlight=3" ];
networking.hostName = "hyperion"; # Define your hostname.
networking.networkmanager.enable = true; # Easiest to use and most distros use this by default.
time.timeZone = "Europe/London";
i18n.defaultLocale = "en_GB.UTF-8";
console = {
font = "Lat2-Terminus16";
# keyMap = "uk";
useXkbConfig = true; # use xkbOptions in tty.
};
hardware.bluetooth.enable = true;
hardware.pulseaudio.enable = true;
programs.thunar.enable = true;
services.blueman.enable = true;
services.xserver.enable = true;
services.xserver.layout = "uk";
services.xserver.libinput.enable = true;
services.xserver.windowManager.bspwm.enable = true;
services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.enable = true;
services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.background = "/home/iban/Pictures/wallpapers/fu5RgsM.jpg";
services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.greeters.gtk.cursorTheme.name = "Catppuccin-Macchiato-Dark-Cursors";
services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.greeters.gtk.theme.name = "Materia-dark-compact";
services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.greeters.gtk.iconTheme.name = "Materia-dark-compact";
services.xserver.displayManager.lightdm.greeters.gtk.indicators = [ "~power" ];
services.gnome.gnome-keyring.enable = true;
# services.printing.enable = true;
sound.enable = true;
users.users.iban = {
isNormalUser = true;
initialPassword = "1234567";
shell = pkgs.zsh;
extraGroups = [ "wheel" "networkmanager" "audio" "video" "docker" "input" "storage" ];
packages = with pkgs; [
zsh
thunderbird
];
};
nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
nixpkgs.config.pulseaudio = true;
virtualisation.docker.enable = true;
virtualisation.docker.storageDriver = "btrfs";
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
(polybar.override { mpdSupport = true; })
accountsservice
amfora
argocd
arp-scan
aseprite
awscli2
bat
bc
calc
catppuccin-cursors.macchiatoDark
cargo
chromium
clippy
dmenu
docker
dos2unix
drawterm
dunst
feh
ffmpeg
fftw
figlet
file
flac
fluxcd
fzf-zsh
gcc
gh
git
gnumake
go
gotop
gpg-tui
gummi
gvfs
hut
imagemagick
jq
k9s
keepass
keepassxc
killall
kitty
kube3d
kubectl
kubectx
kubernetes-helm-wrapped
lagrange
libmpdclient
libreoffice
libvdpau
lightlocker
lsd
lsof
lxappearance
materia-theme
mc
microcodeIntel
microsoft-edge
milkytracker
moc
mpd
mpv
ncdu
ncmpcpp
neofetch
neovim
nerdfonts
netcat-gnu
networkmanager_dmenu
nfs-utils
nmap
nmapsi4
obs-studio
oh-my-zsh
pass
pass-git-helper
pavucontrol
picom
pkg-config
plymouth
power-profiles-daemon
powertop
profanity
pulseaudio
python3
python310Packages.mechanicalsoup
python310Packages.pip
pywal
qbittorrent
qtpass
qutebrowser
ranger
ripgrep
rofi
rsync
rustc
rustfmt
scrot
starship
sxhkd
tdesktop
terraform
tiled
tmux
todo-txt-cli
toot
unzip
upower
vaapiIntel
velero
vim
vlc
vscode
w3m
weather-icons
wget
wmname
xbanish
xclip
xdotool
xfce.thunar
xfce.thunar-archive-plugin
xfce.thunar-media-tags-plugin
xfce.thunar-volman
xfce.xfce4-screenshooter
xorg.xbacklight
xournalpp
yad
youtube-dl
yubikey-manager
yubikey-manager-qt
yubikey-personalization-gui
zathura
zsh
zsh-autosuggestions
zstd
];
fonts.fonts = with pkgs; [
cascadia-code
noto-fonts
(nerdfonts.override { fonts = [ "FiraCode" "DroidSansMono" ]; })
dina-font
fira-code
fira-code-symbols
liberation_ttf
mplus-outline-fonts.githubRelease
nerdfonts
noto-fonts-cjk
noto-fonts-emoji
proggyfonts
];
security.pam.mount.enable = true;
security.pam.mount.createMountPoints = true;
programs.gnupg.agent = {
enable = true;
enableSSHSupport = true;
};
programs.light.enable = true;
programs.zsh = {
enable = true;
ohMyZsh = {
enable = true;
plugins = [ "docker" "git" "gh" "golang" "history" "kubectl" "kubectx" "pass" "rust" "ssh-agent" "sudo" "systemd" "terraform" "tmux" "vault"];
# theme = "robbyrussell";
};
};
hardware.pulseaudio.extraConfig = "load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1";
services.mpd.extraConfig = ''
audio_output {
type "pulse"
name "Pulseaudio"
server "127.0.0.1"
}
audio_output {
type "fifo"
name "Visualizer feed"
path "/tmp/mpd.fifo"
format "44100:16:2"
}
'';
services.mpd.enable = true;
services.mpd.musicDirectory = "nfs://192.168.0.2/Music/";
services.power-profiles-daemon.enable = true;
services.upower.enable = true;
services.udisks2.enable = true;
security.polkit.enable = true;
services.accounts-daemon.enable = true;
services.gnome.glib-networking.enable = true;
services.gvfs.enable = true;
services.tumbler.enable = true;
services.xserver.updateDbusEnvironment = true;
services.openssh.enable = true;
networking.firewall.enable = true;
networking.firewall.allowedTCPPorts = [ 22 ];
system.copySystemConfiguration = true;
system.stateVersion = "22.11";
}
NOTE: "1234567" is NOT my password ;-)