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Have you ever been disappointed with Linux? (libretechni.ca)

submitted 2 days ago by cm0002@libretechni.ca to c/linux@programming.dev

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Personally I haven't. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it's whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.

OQB @pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works

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[–] insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

you don’t have to! Just install the package
and it will use your ad-hoc dotfiles like it would on any other distro

And changes will last on reboot, y'know with the whole immutable thing?

EDIT: I couldn't find straightforward (to me) info on this even searching for stuff like 'NixOS mutable home', but after the reply to this I tried different terms and found the wiki page on impermanence. Specifically, the persisting+home managing sections:

Some files and folders should be persisted between reboots though (such as /etc/nixos/).
This can be accomplished through bind mounts or by using the NixOS Impermanence module, which will set up bind mounts and links as needed.

and

You can just make a home partition on a drive and mount it as normal, so everything in /home or /home/username will be persisted

However, then files are stored read-only in the Nix store. In order to persist files while still being writable, you can use the Home Manager Impermanence module

[–] a14o@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago

Absolutely! I'll give you an example. In the NixOS config for my desktop I have the lines:

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    firefox
    ...
  ];
}

So Firefox is installed every time I build a system with this config. This is just like apt-get install firefox in that very user can use it after installation. The config lives in the respective user's dotfiles (.config/mozilla/firefox) and will of course survive reboots.

What I chose to do additionally (but this is in no way required!) is a home-manager config for my main account with the lines:

{
  programs.firefox = {
    enable = true;
    policies = {
      DisableFirefoxAccounts = true;
      DisablePocket = true;
      DisableTelemetry = true;
      DownloadDirectory = "${config.home.homeDirectory}/tmp";
      OfferToSaveLogins = false;
      ...
  }
  ...
}

This is a declarative configuration that basically handles my dotfiles (profiles, extensions, themes, ...) for me. I think you have the impression that this is mandatory, but it is really a very specific behavior through the home-manager module, but you can absolutely run NixOS without it.