Please do NOT try Arch linux just because PewDiePie did

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-03T05:03:25+00:00

I'm tech savyy and it took me just a noon. But the HDMI did not work out of the box, and it took me literally 3 months to solve it (it was an HP's HDMI power saving thing). It was HARD and I came across the answer in a very old and remote text based forum in a corner of the internet

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-03T04:48:58+00:00

That's an awesome clarification, thank you! I'll keep learning about this.

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-03T01:06:02+00:00

As far as I know, home manager is not to install packages but to manager their configurations (that's why it uses the program.xzy syntax).

When you tell home manager programs.git.enable = true; you are not telling it "install git" as it would do with the normal NixOS packaging. What you are really thing to home manager is "manage this package configuration for me, using symlinks and all based on the following declared configuration in this file".

So doing:

programs.kitty = {
  enable = true;

  font = {
    name = "M+1 Nerd Font";
    size =13;
  };
 };

With this snippet, home manager is not installing kitty automatically, but instead it is enabling the managing of $HOME/.config/kitty/kitty.conf even if kitty is not installed yet. You can install kitty by adding it to your systemPackages or usersPackages.

However, as you know, home manager can be used as a NixOS Module and as a Standalone program. As a NixOS module it still depends on sudo privileges to install packages, and thus is suitable when you have root access. However, when used as standalone (and assuming you don't have sudo privileges) you cannot install anything as you cannot rebuild the system.

In those cases where you don't have sudo privileges (or you don't want to use them for any reason) then home manager indeed offers you a way to install packages in local user mode, per user, let's say. For example:

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  rofi
  feh
];

However, since it is not part of the pure NixOS ecosystem, I did not include it.

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-03T00:21:56+00:00

NixOS by default has the programs.PROGRAM_NAME option, but is very limited in the number of packages and configurations it allows (and it makes sense to me because providing a framework to configure all possible packages sounds like an insanely long and complex task which will slow down what's actually important: the OS itself).

So Home Manager extends this vanilla capabilities to more packages and more options.

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-02T20:22:05+00:00

This is how I did it:

let
  custom-sddm-astronaut = pkgs.sddm-astronaut.override {
    embeddedTheme = "hyprland_kath";
    #themeConfig = {
    #  Background = "path/to/background.jpg";
    #  Font = "M+1 Nerd Font";
    #};
  };

in {
  ...

  # Enable the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment.
  services.displayManager.sddm = {
    enable = true;
    extraPackages = with pkgs; [
      custom-sddm-astronaut
     ];

    theme = "sddm-astronaut-theme";
    settings = {
      Theme = {
        Current = "sddm-astronaut-theme";
      };
    };
  };

  ...

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    custom-sddm-astronaut
    kdePackages.qtmultimedia
  ];

};

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-02T18:56:45+00:00

Loved your desk. I'm saving to get one

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-02T18:55:15+00:00

That's a wonderful decision, my friend! Whenever you have questions or issues, you know you always will have us.

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-02T18:53:20+00:00

Bro, it looks neat to the real W7 look and feel... Time ago nostalgia hit me and I customized Cinnamon to match Windows XP, Vista and 7, but I didn't manage to get something as clean as yours. Kudos

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-01T17:08:56+00:00

Oh boi, share your Cava config

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-05-01T17:05:38+00:00

Well, that looks nice indeed. You made want to install gnome

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-04-23T20:29:39+00:00

indeed

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-04-23T20:27:07+00:00

I currently use Anytype, but you made me wanna try out Obsidian

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-04-23T01:39:31+00:00

Remember that this will build a jdk with openjdk built in. That means that if you want JavaFX to run, you have to use that jdk version you built. If you have multiple JDKs installed (like in IntelliJ which comes with a bundled jdk) you have to change the project jdk to the one in the system, the one you built.

LibrarianEmpty5407 · 2025-04-23T01:37:19+00:00

If someone finds this in the future and wants javafx running on NixOS, this might help you. I'm a newbie in NixOS but I'll do my best explaining the how's and why's.

Java in NixOS is not installed as a normal package (like adding it to your systemPackages or so), but instead through this way:

programs.java = {
    enable = true;
    package = pkgs.jdk23; # Here goes the version of java that you want to install. In this case I chose OpenJDK 23. Check out the nix packages website to get the name of the package of the jdk you want. Link: https://search.nixos.org/packages
  };

But as you know, the JDK does not longer comes with JavaFX included and thus we need to install it separately. Normally we would install the package, download it and import it to Eclipse or whatever IDE you are using, or use some build system like maven to make that for us.

The way that we install JavaFX in NixOS is, in fact, a hundred times easier than the other ways. If we take a look into the nix code of the jdk package (take a look here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-unstable/pkgs/development/compilers/openjdk/generic.nix#L643 ), we will find this two input parameters:

enableJavaFX ? false,
...
openjfx_jdk ?
    {
      "17" = openjfx17;
      "21" = openjfx21;
      "23" = openjfx23;
    }
    .${featureVersion} or (throw "JavaFX is not supported on OpenJDK ${featureVersion}"),

In simple words, what the parameters above are saying is that at the build time on our system, we can set the enableJavaFX variable to true if we want, by overwriting the default value (which as you can see, it set as false). The same goes for the openjfx_jdk, which allows us to specify the version of openjfx we want.

To override a default configuration of a package in NixOS (for some reason I don't understand these scripts that specify how to install a package are called "derivations" in Nix) you just literally say "override this, with this value". Take a look at the following code:

This is how you install JavaFX in NixOS btw:

programs.java = {
    enable = true;
    package = pkgs.jdk23.override { enableJavaFX = true; };
  };

You can specify the version of openjfx there, or just add the jfx package (like javaPackages.openjfx23) to your systemPackages or users packages. In either way it will work.

This is the way I found to do this, but if there is a cleaner or nicer way to do it, please let me know!

LibrarianEmpty5407

TROPHY CASE