I first installed NixOS last November on a whim, because I was going to redo my Arch installation but saw a post about it somewhere on the internet. On a whim, I messaged my friend (who’s an avid Gentoo lover, we love to butt heads) I was switching to NixOS, and ran the installation while I went to eat dinner.
I’ve loved it so far. I really appreciate the declarative approach that Nix as a package manager and system configuration bring to the table, and I’ve even taken a couple shots at building my own programming projects into Nix packages to include in my system configuration.
But lately I’ve been getting cold feet.
I’ve started noticing more friction (or perhaps I’ve just been more sensitive) in certain aspects of configuration. A lot of the normal things of course- poor (but improving!) documentation, hideous error messages, slow eval / rebuild times, unpackaged software that I’m too lazy to package (although quite frankly it could make a fun hobby), yada yada yada…
Normally I shrug it off. I’m not great with Linux, never have been, but I live and I learn all the same, and although NixOS search and GitHub repositories are no Arch wiki, I don’t actually find it all that hard to get over hurdles.
I think a big part of why it’s become tiring is that I’ve always had something in mind for Nix. Always some fun ricing to do, like neovim with NixVim, plasma manager, always more language features to apply to my configuration, always more to learn about Nix as a software building tool, etc.
I don’t want to spend the whole post complaining, though. I’ve given it quite a lot of thought and decided I don’t really intend on leaving NixOS (I actually wrote an entire section in my flake README about why I was going to leave, and then promptly git restore’d the file). I really enjoy declarative configuration as a philosophy and overall I’ve had a great experience.
I’m looking for fun new topics to read/learn about outside of my work/summer school schedule, and I decided it’s finally time for me to get involved in the community, having lurked accountless for the past 6 months.
So yeah. What’s everyone up to at the moment? What fun Nix (or otherwise just interesting) projects has everyone been doing in their free time?
TLDR:
I’ve had a lot less time to browse blogs and discourse like I used to recently, and I wanted some thoughts and ideas from people in the community for fun things to do. I’ve been looking at things like erase your darlings and NixOps, but I was curious what everyone else has been tinkering with recently? Thanks in advance!