McMahon reaction meme depicting increasing satisfaction. Descriptions read as follows:

  1. “You discover a new app”
  2. “It’s in Nixpkgs”
  3. “It has a NixOS module”
  4. “It has a Home Manager module”
  5. “It has a Stylix module which makes it look awesome”
    • dinckel@lemmy.world
      14·
      17 hours ago

      Just to clarify for everyone else:

      • Nixpkgs is the equivalent of a core distro repository for NixOS. Instead of Core + Extra + Multilib + AUR on Arch, we just have Nixpkgs that has everything
      • A Nix “module” is essentially an app with pre-packaged declarable options. So rather than just installing something as is, you can use its options to declare how you want it installed. I can get firefox, with a package definition for firefox-nightly, and also tell it which addons I want bundled, for example. 99% of the time, this is the preferred way to do things.
      • Home-Manager is a third-party Nix module, that lets you declare stuff in ~/. Very convenient for shells, browsers, and whatever else you want in there. Let’s say you want to have a specific shell, with a specific ssh signing key, and whatever prompt you like. The home-manager daemon would build it for you with a new system evaluation.
      • Stylix is another third-party Nix module. For supported things, it will style your apps with the preferences you’ve defined. Handy if you want a uniform look and feel for the things you use
      • mogoh@lemmy.ml
        5·
        22 hours ago

        You use the word “declare” a lot. I am not sure, but in Nix I declare the desired state of installed packages and configurations in an obscure language and the package manger takes care of that, right?
        Now the module declare reasonable default configurations? Like http server starts on system start and serves on port 80?
        Now you lost me at the Home-Manger. I can declare stuff in my home folder. OK, so for user-wide configuration? For packages and configuration in the user space? Or what?

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          15 hours ago

          I am not sure, but in Nix I declare the desired state of installed packages and configurations in an obscure language and the package manger takes care of that, right?

          The package manager is only one (very important) component of the system that applies your configuration, but otherwise this is a good description, yeah.

          Now the module declare reasonable default configurations? Like http server starts on system start and serves on port 80?

          Obviously, it depends on each individual module, but so far, I’ve mostly been fine with the defaults. Typically, it doesn’t modify the configuration, unless you explicitly specify a configuration value, therefore using the defaults that the software normally uses.

          Now you lost me at the Home-Manger. I can declare stuff in my home folder. OK, so for user-wide configuration? For packages and configuration in the user space? Or what?

          It’s for user-wide configuration, so what would generally be stored in dotfiles. For example, you can configure the search engines in Firefox. Or the panel layout in KDE.

          Home-Manager can also install packages, which is useful, because it can also be used standalone on other distributions. And in particular, you usually want to declare that a package should be installed and what user configuration it should use, all in one place…

        • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
          5·
          22 hours ago
          1. Yes.
          2. Yes, and if you want custom configuration, you can include your configuration in-line in the same file that installs the http server and sets up systemd for it. Or you can even write your own module that drops configuration files in the same file.
          3. Home-manager modules are modules that run stuff exclusively in ~, doing things like configuring browsers or dotfiles. As opposed to NixOS modules which configure system-level daemons.