On the download page there is a VirtualBox appliance available. For other distributions I would not be interested in this kind of user experience because I would assume it gives me a system with a lot of things pre-installed that I might not want and somehow in a hard to understand state. However, given that declarative installation is the main thing of NixOS, maybe this is different.
Could somebody comment on how easy it would be to do a “re-install” of that appliance from within? I think such a thing is possible with NixOS, right?
Here@matklad commented that there are still some things that are tricky to manage with Nix like dotfiles and Plasma.
I would like to know if there is anything like that in that appliance. And if people would recommend it anyway as a first NixOS experience.
I used it as a base for my VM at work, though as I’m not fully in agreement with some setup for the default user that I can not change declaratively easily (the home folder and name), I will probably set up my own box when I have the time.
The nice thing is, you can take a look at how it is generated:
The /etc/nixos/configuration.nix that ships with the VM basically just imports the file linked above and adds some extra comments.
It ships with SDDM and plasma per default, but you can change that.
One thing that annoys me is auto login which I have not found the appropriate option to disable so far.
Other than that, the base system seems to be very clean and you have to add to your config as you need it.