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.

  • Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    The NixOS community has a lot of cargo culting going on, probably because it’s not super accessible. Using Flakes and Home Manager for absolutely everything is a part of that in my opinion. I ended up going back and forth on both of them, my current opinion is that Home Manager makes sense (if you have a use case for it) but Flakes don’t.

    If you really need to import a flake-only project from a non-Flake config you can use builtins.getFlake. Personally if a project makes this required by inlining everything in a flake.nix I would consider that a sign of shoddy programming and it makes me reconsider using it, but it is possible.

    If you’re talking about using snippets of what other people have in their configs, then most of them should work perfectly fine. You may have to replace an inputs.whatever.nixosModules.default with a fetchTarball or an equivalent reference to an npins file but that’s a pretty minor change.

    For Home Manager such a translation doesn’t exist because Home Manager does a lot of different things, and even when HM reimplements something that’s already in NixOS (like HM dconf vs NixOS services.dconf) it usually doesn’t quite act the same way, if only because most programs treat package, system and user configuration differently.