this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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NixOS is the best operating system I absolutely cannot recommend to anyone - Anurag Singh (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 2 days ago by ruffsl@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev
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[โ€“] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

It does, that's the home.file escape hatch I mentioned. But then you end up paying 10-30 seconds eval for a "config" that looks like this:

{
  home.file.".bashrc".source = ./bashrc;
  home.file.".bash_profile".source = ./bash_profile;
  xdg.configFile.nvim.source = ./nvim;
  xdg.configFile.sway.source = ./sway;
  # ...
}

I suppose there are fringe use cases where Nix attrset merging behaviour is useful, but in the general case I just don't see much value here.

[โ€“] balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

You don't have to waste 30 seconds on a full eval when just iterating, I use these one-liners when trying to get some config file working: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-config/blob/master/flake.nix#L140 ; they only evaluate one specific file and then link it into the right location "imperatively"

Then when I get it working I do the nixos-rebuild switch, which is a no-op in terms of home-manager stuff because the link points to the same location, it just makes it so that it stays the same after a reboot (I use impermanence).