Fascinating! How’s it compare to youtube-tui? I’m really interested in starting to use a program like this… the YouTube website is so unbearably slow.

Hey friend,

My recommendation is to keep things dead simple as you start out—no fancy channels or flake inputs and such, at least not where not necessary. I’ve found a lot of success in going slow, and not feeling rushed to do everything the NixOS way at first (for example, I still manage my dotfiles with GNU stow instead of home-manager). I started off with a very simple flake and basically just using my configuration.nix to declare packages, gradually learning more from there. The Nix ecosystem is as extremely powerful as it is poorly documented—it unfortunately sometimes takes a while to (as you’ve noted) even just find information.

I’ve linked below two sites I found unbelievably helpful in my journey—the first one helps you get up and running with a very simple flake (and, yes, you will want to use a flake, even if it isn’t obvious right now why), and the second one is a huge search engine of all NixOS options, the first place I check when I’m putting something new on my system.

Good luck!

https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

https://mynixos.com/

How have I never heard of this! This is awesome!

Very cool. yabai is a great project that makes macOS actuallly usable.

Wow! Finally a niri user out in the wild! I’m super curious to hear about your experiences with it—do you find it to be stable enough for day to day use? What’s your workflow like? How’s it compare to what you’ve used before?

Always nice to see Helix :)

I think it’s possible to remap Helix to be almost (if not completely) Vim-like. I got it to be (I think completely) Kakoune-like with like 15 lines in my config.

Grass. He’s outside. He’s escaped the computer.

Switching to Nix could certainly simplify a lot of things. I wouldn't be surprised if they went that direction soon.

I use GNU stow for my dotfiles because I like it better than the way home manager does it (but I still use home manager for other things). Big piece of advice I’d give is to just remember, as you learn Nix stuff and get all excited about “reproducibility” and “declaring” things, that you don’t have to do everything the Nix way. You could very easily have a single configuration.nix file that mostly just specifies packages and then do nearly everything else the old-fashioned way. It’s your system and your comfort. (But for the record, I used arch-based systems for a long time as well, and though it took me about a week to figure out what I was doing in a NixOS VM, the satisfaction when I finally deployed to bare metal and everything just worked exactly as I intended it to was quite nice). And as others have said here, nixpkgs is massive and likely has all of what you need.

Can vouch for KDE Connect—especially powerful on android.

Good question, I don’t know! I haven’t touched a Chromebook since at least 2020…

If I were to do it now, I’d probably still use crouton, but get it to download something other than Ubuntu 16.04, or I’d just dual boot.