NixOS Baby Steps

dpmt

• 4 min read
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NixOS Baby Steps

Trying to figure out how to use NixOS to accomplish 3 goals:

  1. Have a stable "daily driver" laptop for web browsing, light gaming, programming, etc.
  2. Spin up reproducible development environments faster and easier than my old Vagrant / VirtualBox setup.
  3. Build up some basic sysadmin skills, putting together a better homelab.

Resources

Introductory textbooks

Introduction to Nix & NixOS | NixOS & Flakes Book
An unofficial and opinionated book for beginners
NixOS & Flakes Book
Wombat’s Book of Nix
Amy de Buitléir

More specific blog posts

DIY Music Streaming with NixOS, Jellyfin and Manet
In this post I describe how I’m hosting my own music streaming service with NixOS and Jellyfin on Hetzner for €6 / month.
Arne Bahlo
Using Nix to Fuzz Test a PDF Parser (Part One)
Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools from source and chasing down dependencies upon dependencies. I recently found that Nix eliminates a lot of the gruntwork from fuzz testing. I created a Nix configuration that kicks off a fuzz testing workflow with a single command. The only dependencies are Nix and git.
Michael Lynch
Paranoid NixOS Setup
Xe Iaso’s personal website.

Chinese Pinyin

After struggling a bit with fcitx5 and ibus, BerryJ's config was the simplest:

{ config, pkgs, ... };

{
  i18n = {
    inputMethod = {
      enable = true;
      type = "ibus";
      ibus.engines = with pkgs.ibus-engines; [ pinyin ];
    };
  };
}

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

I then had to reboot, and I could select Chinese (Pinyin) in the GNOME Keyboard Settings.

Steam

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  programs = {
    steam = {
      enable = true;
      remotePlay.openFirewall = true;
      dedicatedServer.openFirewall = true;
      localNetworkGameTransfers.openFirewall = true;
    };
  };

  nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
}

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

Home Manager

This seems to be most useful to install stuff that is commonly configured in a user's home directory.

{ inputs, lib, config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  home = {
    shellAliases = { em = "emacsclient -nw"; };

    packages = with pkgs; [
      nix-prefetch-git
      ripgrep
      jq
    ];
  };

  programs = {
    bash = {
      enable = true;
      enableCompletion = true;
    };

    emacs = {
      enable = true;
      extraPackages = epkgs: [
        epkgs.nix-mode
        epkgs.nixfmt
        epkgs.expand-region
      ];
      extraConfig = ''
        (setq standard-indent 2)
      '';
    };

    ghostty = {
      enable = true;
      package = if pkgs.stdenv.isDarwin then pkgs.ghostty-bin else pkgs.ghostty;

      enableBashIntegration = true;

      settings = {
        theme = "Abernathy";
        background-opacity = "0.95";
      };
    };

    home-manager.enable = true;
  };

  services = {
    emacs = {
      enable = true;
      defaultEditor = true;
    };
  };

  systemd.user.startServices = "sd-switch";
  home.stateVersion = "25.11";
}

/etc/nixos/home.nix

Flakes

{
  description = "NixOS configuration";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-25.11";
    home-manager = {
      url = "github:nix-community/home-manager/release-25.11";
      inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    };
  };

  outputs = inputs@{ nixpkgs, home-manager, ... }: {
    nixosConfigurations.nixos = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      modules = [
        ./configuration.nix

        home-manager.nixosModules.home-manager
          {
            home-manager.useGlobalPkgs = true;
            home-manager.useUserPackages = true;
            home-manager.users.dtoma = import ./home.nix;
          }
      ];
    };
  };
}

/etc/nixos/flake.nix

Maintenance

To rebuild, run sudo nixos-rebuild switch.

From time to time, run:

nix-store --gc
nix-store --optimise

https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Storage_optimization

Upgrade

Add the new version:

nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-26.05 nixos
nix-channel --update

Edit the configs:

# configuration.nix

{
  system.stateVersion = "26.05";
}

# flake.nix
inputs = {
  nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-26.05";
  nixpkgs-unstable.url = "github:nixos/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
  home-manager = {
    url = "github:nix-community/home-manager/release-26.05";
    inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
  };
};

# home.nix
{
  home.stateVersion = "26.05";
}

Then run sudo nixos-rebuild switch and let the computer reboot.

Clean up:

nix-store --gc

> deleting unused links...
> note: hard linking is currently saving 654.2 MiB
> 1055 store paths deleted, 1.7 GiB freed

nix-store --optimise

> 4.1 GiB freed by hard-linking 535308 files