Almost every NixOS tutorial I encounter, be that blog or video, says to use Flakes and Home Manager. While that definitely speaks to the value of these tools, I find myself, instinctually, wanting to avoid them. I’ve attempted to get them working multiple time, and encountered more issues than they solved, for me. I interpret this to mean my knowledge and/or use case of NixOS is not ready for me to use these tools effectively. On top of that, something about a set of files that could all be put into a single unified config appeals to me (which flakes/hm can probably do too, but hopefully to get my vibe).
My reasoning aside, this has made me curious if there is some way for me to “backport” all these configs I encounter into my set of more default style configs. The primary goal I have that lead me to this is rootless Podman and declaring my containers in the config. If anyone has any guidance or resources you could point me to it would be much appreciated.
I’m not sure what you want to achieve… do you want NixOS running in podman containers as a service? Do you want to have some kind of package that starts up podman with nix packages in it?
Could you provide your usecase(s)? “As a X I want to Y”. “As a X when I do Y I expect Z to happen”.
It’s just confusing to see flakes and home manager mentioned and some “backported” podman output to be desired. Individually those words make sense but together I’m lost.
I think they might have read this thread, where the Discourse OP is using Home Manager to declare podman containers because the NixOS module just doesn’t support doing that. And flakes ended up in the question because a lot of other examples online just assume the reader is using flakes.
I’m not a podman user so I’m not sure how much work it would be to not use Home Manager here, it feels like it shouldn’t be much more annoying than what the discourse OP is already doing, but I haven’t tried.