I try to set up my digital home with few dotfiles. There is a common denominator for configuration in UNIX called environment variables. It is not as complex as Windows Registers and not as widely used. But I try to rely on them as most as I can, because it is easy to move configuration back and forth when all you need to change is the script you call to set those variables.

I keep the notes on how to set up my digital home in a home.txt file. All my system revolves around three scripts: profile, which set the variables; session, which sets a terminal session; and this Rube Goldberg machine I call xsession, which sets a X11 session. All scripts depend on programs that can be used as is, with as little configuration as possible. The script gluing them together is how I configure them.

(26-04-2021, 10:57 AM)venam Wrote: Alright, one of my favorite thread.
I've been trying out nix the past few days and as the people in this thread have noted, it's indeed a wonderful way to have less ties with a machine.
Do you have new tricks or ideas related to that topic? Maybe things related to nix or nixOS too?

I used to use NixOS, and from my experience with it, I'd recommend playing around with the (unstable) Flakes feature, which can be used to set up a new machine running NixOS with all of your dotfiles on it and all of your packages installed.

Along with this feature, I wrote a small shell script to run nix commands and sync my dotfiles, so instead of having to type out all the separate nix and git commands I could run to rebuild my configuration, to sync my local dotfiles with the ones on github, and to remove old generations and collect garbage, along with some other commands to do various things in NixOS.

(19-08-2021, 07:41 AM)_-_Specter_-_ Wrote: I'd recommend playing around with the (unstable) Flakes feature, which can be used to set up a new machine running NixOS with all of your dotfiles on it and all of your packages installed.

Does that work with other version control systems than Git?

(19-08-2021, 12:17 PM)jkl Wrote:

(19-08-2021, 07:41 AM)_-_Specter_-_ Wrote: I'd recommend playing around with the (unstable) Flakes feature, which can be used to set up a new machine running NixOS with all of your dotfiles on it and all of your packages installed.

Does that work with other version control systems than Git?

I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. I personally haven't tested other vcs, but pairing flakes with Home-manager to manage dotfiles via symlinks should work with any vcs, and even no vcs at all.