Use NixOS Calamares GUI installer with prebuilt binary mirrors

Development
1

Hi,

I’m new to NixOS and this is my first time installing it. I found the Calamares-based GUI installer provided by NixOS to be very user-friendly, as it helps beginners avoid writing Nix configurations and dealing with many related details. However, this GUI installer does not seem to provide a way to specify a mirror as an alternative to cache.nixos.org. In some countries, this can make the installation extremely slow (for example, around 10 kbps). (If there is a way to do this, please let me know—sorry if I simply missed it.)

I searched through publicly available information but couldn’t find a good solution. As a result, I wrote a patch for calamares-nixos-extensions in nixpkgs using Codex
(calamares: add mirror selection · PragmaTwice/nixpkgs@0f4f2ad · GitHub).
With this patch applied, a mirror configuration page appears in the Calamares installer, allowing users to enter a mirror URL. This URL is then used during installation and automatically written to configuration.nix. I’ve tested it and it works quite well, aside from some UI details that haven’t been carefully polished yet (such as the length and placement of the input box).

Since I couldn’t find an existing solution, I wanted to share this so that other users who encounter the same issue can benefit from it, and also to see whether the community has a better approach.

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2

Well, not exactly. It helps to get the first installation done but not avoid writing nix entirely. There was a really good GUI tool for that but it is abondand. There are some other tools out there that try the same but I never tried them myself.

It helps with the basics, not with the nitty gritty details.

You can probably configure the nix in the iso beforehand to use that other mirror though.