Pain points in the NixOS installation procedure

[raboof]

In Marketing Team: Can we present Nix/NixOS better? - #42 by SRGOM @SRGOM mentioned:

@SRGOM

Starting internet. We could just have iwd as default. Which has a much simpler interface using iwctl tui. No more wpa_supplicant and it’s quirks. But even otherwise, there could be a tui that asks user to enter username and pwd for wifi, and do a rebuild switch in the live environment (if it works at all).

For me this was indeed the main frustration: typing my long SSID, long password, and a long ethernet interface name into the wpa_supplicant felt like being back in the 90’s, and i had to do it several times because I had to go back and forth between my installed partition and the installer because I forgot to install the various tools needed to use the network in the installed partition.

I haven’t used iwctl but a TUI sounds great for the initial connection.

To prevent having to ‘go back and forth’ it would be nice to have a selection of pre-filled configuration.nix examples, including ones with ‘things you would typically need on a laptop/desktop’ (such as a window manager and the wifi tools).

I also enabled disk encryption, that was relatively simple but if we could make it even more obvious to people how to do that I think that would be a great improvement.

I found the installation to still be easier than Arch, by the way, but perhaps that is a low bar .