McMahon reaction meme depicting increasing satisfaction. Descriptions read as follows:
- “You discover a new app”
- “It’s in Nixpkgs”
- “It has a NixOS module”
- “It has a Home Manager module”
- “It has a Stylix module which makes it look awesome”
McMahon reaction meme depicting increasing satisfaction. Descriptions read as follows:
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?
The package manager is only one (very important) component of the system that applies your configuration, but otherwise this is a good description, yeah.
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.
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…
~, doing things like configuring browsers or dotfiles. As opposed to NixOS modules which configure system-level daemons.