A lot of people – myself included – have complained that installing NixOS is a pain. So I went ahead and created a CLI installer, nixos-up, to set up the whole thing for you from the comfort of the Live ISO. So far it
- Auto-detects BIOS vs UEFI and partitions the disk for you accordingly.
- Generates sensible /etc/nixos/configuration.nix files for desktop and server environments.
- Installs home-manager.
- Auto-detects time zone and sets it up.
- Auto-detects available RAM and sets up the appropriate amount of swap space.
and basically just tries to get you into a working NixOS install as quickly as possible.
I put together a quick demo video here: https://youtu.be/f7DzbiRD99Q. You can check out the project here: GitHub - samuela/nixos-up: The fastest NixOS install there is! 🏎️🏁. The install is just one command:
sudo nix-shell https://github.com/samuela/nixos-up/archive/main.tar.gz
Hopefully others will find it useful! If there’s interest, I’d be happy to donate the project into nixpkgs and the installer ISO.