Why I switched to Manjaro Linux

[KoviRobi]

@trusktr

Maybe, but with Manjaro at least I get something without thinking about it. It may be nice if NixOS gets “flavors” like Gnome flavor, KDE flavor, in the form of configurations (minus the hardware parts which still need to be generated), and these flavors would come with everything that people expect from a full desktop so they don’t have to configure a single thing. People who like to configure everything don’t have to use the config flavors.

Indeed, I hope I didn’t sound too forceful, I think your decision to go to something you find easier to use is sensible, I just wanted to point this out should you, or someone else wishing to use Nix and having battery problems, find it useful. That being said, even with the Intel powertop, my laptop battery performance is only 5-7 hours on NixOS compared to 6-8 on Windows. I think the adaptive screen brightness might play some role.

@worldofpeace

This is something I want to have in NixOS that we could incubate. It’s actually much easier to achieve this in NixOS because of our module system. From just looking at my configuration on my machine, I have a lot of tweaks that I guess distros like manjaro have as defaults.

That sounds very cool, in a similar vein I have previously wondered how difficult would it be to make a minimal NixOS install akin to TinyCore – not mutli-gigabyte pendrives are expensive these days. I would hope/expect the NixOS approact to producing a distro might be more maintainable. Or we could perhaps capture some of the benefits of Intel Clear. That would be nice

[jonringer]

@worldofpeace

This is something I want to have in NixOS that we could incubate. It’s actually much easier to achieve this in NixOS because of our module system. From just looking at my configuration on my machine, I have a lot of tweaks that I guess distros like manjaro have as defaults.

we already kind of do this for laptops: GitHub - NixOS/nixos-hardware: A collection of NixOS modules covering hardware quirks. , I wonder if we could make “sensible” defaults into some profiles. An example configuration.nix:

  imports = [
    <nixos/profiles/manjaro>
    ./hardware-configuration.nix
  ];

I think for people that, “don’t really want to think about each individual part that goes into my system”. They will gladly defer this work to someone else.

NixOS really only has power users, because they (myself included) either want explicit control, or don’t mind dealing with explicit control of everything.

[danieldk]

@jonringer

I think for people that, “don’t really want to think about each individual part that goes into my system”. They will gladly defer this work to someone else.

I think this would be nice, also as an on-boarding experience. When I first installed NixOS and put services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5.enable = true in my fresh configuration.nix, I was a bit disappointed getting a very bare-bones desktop that didn’t even have a PDF reader or image viewer installed (if I remember correctly, I don’t use KDE currently, but I think I had to add okular, gwenview, etc. myself).

In the end it’s fine to cherry-pick packages, but when you are just starting, there is already a lot to wrap your head around and then it’s nice if you at least have a functional desktop .

[worldofpeace]

Well put, being that NixOS literally puts every little switch in your control, power users are pleased with it. We talked about the profile thing in Cleanup GNOME3 default applications · Issue #67310 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub, but we steered away from it. Configurations, at least how we define them here, aren’t really in nixpkgs.

There’s the “profiles” used in our images here

• https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/nixos/modules/profiles
• https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/master/nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd

But I don’t think people should be using these, at least how they are now.

What we could have is a “NixOS Profiles” repository.
Tailored configurations for users who don’t care about the details, ready to import.

[costrouc]

@KoviRobi

  # One or the other, probably not both but not sure
  powerManagement.powertop.enable = true;
  services.tlp.enable = true;

Wow I should have used this much much earlier with my laptop in NixOS. Added at least 50% more time to my laptop battery life. Thank you very much!

[KoviRobi]

@jonringer

we already kind of do this for laptops: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware

This excellent, but not very well advertised, it’s the first time I have heard of it and I think it should be in the NixOS manual, and perhaps as a comment in the output of the generated hardware-configuration.nix

[jonringer]

I only know of it because I was added to the github nixpkgs group, which I think auto-subscribed me to the related repo’s… xD

@KoviRobi

This excellent, but not very well advertised, it’s the first time I have heard of it and I think it should be in the NixOS manual, and perhaps as a comment in the output of the generated hardware-configuration.nix

I think it’s considered “community-ran”, and not an official NixOS platform. Which is probably why there’s little to no advertising on it.

[wmertens]

This is exactly why we need a community-curated set of profiles - yes I’m a power user, but I’m not interested in exactly which settings deliver the best battery life, I’m interested in other things.

Nix gives the power to take a complete profile, and let you make a change to any thing you like thanks to the lazy evaluation. Nothing else can deliver that.

If the default laptop profile has a sleep setting that I find annoying, I can override just that one thing and let the rest be. In Linux Mint, I’d have to install an entire different distro.