Is there any way to create a NixOS installation media to fully install a running custom environment without expert knowledge - so that any fool could install it on a fresh new device and it would partition the hard drive and install the custom software and run it after boot (or even immediately)?
How would that work? Is there a current version of documentation on how to accomplish that?
NixOS 23.05 manual | Nix & NixOS + a hand-written script that just calls nixos-install against a config. I don’t think there are official docs for this, but it’s not very difficult.
Combine it with GitHub - nix-community/disko: Format disks with nix-config [maintainer=@Lassulus] for partitioning. You could consider kexec-ing into that, but I’m not sure that you can get proper access to the system at that point.