For those new to Dendrix: It is an on going effort to provide community-driven configurations based on the dendritic pattern. I’ve tried to explain (to the best of my possibilities - I’m not english native speaker) my vision for it.
Previously I had an enourmous README with lots of collapsible sections. I wanted to have a better way to organize documentation and also to visualize what the organization of dendritic repos.
So today I did just that, moved all of README into different chapters and included a faceted search interface with references to where each dendritic aspect is defined.
The search UI was vibe-coded so it has bugs, but I wanted to focus on writing documentation and generating the data from dendritic repositories for the UI. I’ll later fix some UI bugs, but works for now.
Is the Dendritic pattern a good pattern to manage different desktop computers? It’s in my To-do to explore it for my own config.
I feel like it could be a good candidate to make a GUI so people could install apps to the dendritic pattern through the software center, or even a GUI in system settings of a user-friendly NixOS distro for certain OS options
Yes, regarding managing different desktop computers, I’d happily say that yes, the dendritic pattern is particularly well suited for sharing configs across different computers of you (after all you are only re-using common flake modules between them). I hope your exploration has good results for you
Regarding having a “GUI so people could install apps”,
YES! I believe so, and that’s why I’m building these projects. We are still not there (the project is very very young), but here are some updates:
Last week I finished the documentation website. I tried to my best at explaining how dendritic works. And what the Dendrix project is about. Feel free to open an PR, issue or discussion if you feel like we can improve it.
Also, I feel more confident with dendrix infra to support community repositories and exposing subtrees from them. So I believe, code (to facilitate flake modules discovery from third parties) is already there.
Also last week I did work on a flake-file project: A flake.nix file generator (now flake inputs, nixConfig, can be part of flake modules – and I’ve added this to dendrix/templates/default).
Having this last piece (the flake generator from modules), I believe it certainly is possible in the future to have a user-friendly GUI to act as a “software center”. Where users just enable/disable checkboxes (they will be generated from dendritic module options) and they will enable whole aspects (not just packages, but whole configurations across os/home/etc configs). Enabling some modules will automatically contribute some inputs or caches to the containing flake, but the user wont even notice this, the GUI just takes their enabled checkboxes, enables modules for inclusion, regens the flake-file and can then run nixos-rebuild switch. So, yes, it is certainly possible (and that’s one thing I’d love NixOS users to have - that’s why I’m creating these projects) but not everything depends on me.
Looking forward to see how it’s going to evolve.