I’ve been working on nix0 for a bit and think some of you may find some use from it.
I have tried many configurations for NixOS and even other “distros” like Omarchy but found them to always be way over built for my needs. I would find NixOS configurations with tons of declared packages which I had no use for and just wanted a system that was stripped down to the absolute minimum while still being functional. I even went as far as to remove common desktop components such as no application launcher or file manager as that can all be done fairly easily using the terminal. Common eye-candy stuff has also been omitted such as gaps, and animations.
Many configs rely on mouse usage at some point but for nix0 I tried to keep that as minimal as possible and focus on vim bindings throughout.
Part of the idea comes from how I like my system to operate. A lot of tools are used very little so the benefit of NixOS is you can type nix run or nix shell instead of declaring absolutely every package and expanding your configuration into a harder to maintain system.
I’ve also tried to make it as seamless as possible both during install and after install. It includes a guided installer using Gum for the prompts which you run with one command. It also comes with LUKS, Btrfs, and preservation.
After installation is finished you can easily modify the settings in the json for quick tuning after the install such as setting up NVIDIA so Hyprland works smoothly or my favorite being GPU passthrough which I use a ton and the hard part for GPU passthrough is mostly done on the host side.
I’ve also tried to make nix0 a great base for some users who maybe don’t want a system as minimal as this but can use to expand on themselves without having to remove a ton of “bloat” that other configurations may come with.
I don’t personally like Hyprland for non-technical reasons but I do like how you have your CI setup. I need to do something like as I just check that my files are formatted correctly currently:
I get that. Initially I was going to actually use niri but since I already had experience with Hyprland I decided to stick with what I know. Cool part about NixOS is you can run multiple environments fairly easily and I also thought about doing that but it went against my idea of minimalism so I decided not to.
Thanks for your feedback on both the Hyprland and CI setup!