I spent part of yesterday and today re-organizing my flake to make a more logical file structure. Then I did a nixos-rebuild boot and loaded into the new generation. I noticed several things. First, there was a FAILED which flew by. Next, upon entering my password in the logon manager the screen went back to black, showed a few more init messages, followed by the KDE logo spinning a bit before my desktop appeared.
After that, no more WiFi, no more Bluetooth. Turning on BT in the GUI does nothing, the WiFi adapter does not even exist any more.
So, I went back to the previous generation. Everything worked. I did a nixos-rebuild boot of that previous generation. It took less than a second and actually did nothing more than pointing the symbolic link to the already broken generation, it did not create a new generation.
So I did an rm on that broken generation link and did another nixos-rebuild boot. Once again it took less than a second but this time created a new generation. I rebooted. FAILED during boot, spinning KDE icon, no Bluetooth, No WiFi. Nothing changed. It’s the EXACT same configuration as the working generation.
I would conclude that a persistent file somewhere is to blame. But then why does the older generation still work fine?
I have no idea what happened or how to fix it. Please help.
EDIT: With my limited skillset, looking in journalctl it looks like all the firmware loads are failing, followed by home manager for some reason. A whole bunch of Direct firmware load for XXX failed with error -2. For BT it gives that error then tells me the firmware file was not found. The WiFi chip I think has that error followed by failed to early request. The GPU has a bunch as well.