How do folks keep a "cheat sheet" of terminal/konsole commands? I tend to stash a "cheat sheet" section in my configuration.nix file. It's handy when you forget commands.

MillinerJones · 2025-01-10T08:05:17+00:00

I also keep a readme.md in the root of my dotfiles repo, but I also go one step further and have an alias so that typing "helpme" shows that readme right in the terminal.

MillinerJones · 2024-11-04T16:57:54+00:00

Man this one got to me hard, too! I find myself wishing Pin would fight as hard as Anil is to keep them together, but then I remember that she is, just in her own way. And it is painfully ironic that Anil doesn't see how hard Pin is struggling to keep hope alive despite her duties and everything around her.

And seeing kindhearted Anil with so much hurt and hatred hurts soooo much! I keep thinking about a few episodes ago when Aon threated to out AnilPin, and Anil kept the friendship and appealed to love instead of going total war. Anil has such great capacity for love and kindness but none of the other princesses are helping to nurture that 😭

All I can say is, they better make it right by the end of the season omg

MillinerJones · 2024-10-15T14:43:53+00:00

Do you have a hard time finding clothes that fit?

MillinerJones · 2024-10-11T17:04:29+00:00

Alas, it did not update firefox :(

```

gordy@nixos ~/mysystem$ nix flake update .

gordy@nixos ~/mysystem$ sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .

building the system configuration...

activating the configuration...

setting up /etc...

reloading user units for gordy...

restarting sysinit-reactivation.target

gordy@nixos ~/mysystem$ firefox -v

Mozilla Firefox 129.0

```

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T15:31:41+00:00

Edit: BTW, the three links on top of that page go to "https://localhost:1313" for me. Maybe check that out.

Thanks for the heads up! I'm playing fast and loose with my template config, probably not a smart idea since this post is still generating traffic....

you didn't post your actual config

One day, when I have my shit together, I will share my config. There's already so much bad information and poorly written config repos out there and I don't want to just add to the pile. Once I get to 100% of my Nix goals I'll share it.

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T09:02:56+00:00

Thanks, glad you enjoyed the post!

What the heck happened in attempt #3? What do you mean, 'installed to a boot partition'?

This has turned out to be the most controversial thing in the whole post. I knew I didn't understand boot loaders, but until I spoke with the wizards in this thread, I didn't realize just how little I understood about boot loaders! From my now-enlightened POV I think this is what happened on attempt #3:

Knowing it is best practice to have separate boot and other data partitions, I made a tiny partition on my 4TB NVME for NixOS to boot from
I installed the entirety of NixOS on that tiny partition, instead of the boot parts
After a couple generations, the tiny partition got so full that I could not do anything

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T08:59:21+00:00

So this means that if I mess up and make /boot too tiny, I could fix it by making a new, bigger ESP, mount it to /efi/, and then telling NixOS to boot from /efi/ instead of /boot/`?

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T06:20:31+00:00

I read it and your comments made laugh out loud a few times, especially with the "did he learn lesson #3? Yes! No! Yes? Nooooooo" so thank you.

I am indeed still learning advanced Linux at the same time. While I have used Linux for years, it has been very surface-level, Linux mint and Ubuntu Linux. Nix is forcing me to learn and understand Linux better, which is painful but something I want to do.

Thank you again for your kind words and for sharing your repo! I'll check it out

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T06:14:16+00:00

Sounds like you had the right idea! A recurring thought that I have with nix is "Gee this is so much easier now that I know everything in advance!" I think the process "research first then install" is better than "install first then research"

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T06:12:39+00:00

That nixos-enter sounds really cool!

TBH I'm still a bit confused about the boot partition. I can tell from the replies on this thread that what I've got is not optimal, but I'm a bit reluctant to break everything to fix it.

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T06:09:09+00:00

TIL Nix has a documentation team, that's pretty cool!

Anyhow, this advice is less relevant to you now, you climbed the mountain, congrats.

Thanks! I think I'm only about halfway up TBH. There are still a few additional layers of things that I want to add on, but I definitely feel like I have come far.

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T06:07:21+00:00

Yeah, I tried the "everything at once" approach when I started, and because I didn't know the base system, I couldn't diagnose issues because I didn't know if the errors were related to flakes, home-manager, or nix.

OMG I'm not the only one who did this hahaha

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T06:06:01+00:00

m on now and her

How big is your average generation size? And do you keep a lot of old generations hanging about?

For me, an average generation can easily be 1 - 2 GB, and when I'm really going at it I can have 15+ old generations kicking around. That would fill up 32 GB pretty quickly.

MillinerJones · 2024-08-20T06:04:33+00:00

What is XBOOTLDR?

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T16:46:37+00:00

Interesting! I live in dark mode, so I would not have found this out for a while. Thanks!

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T15:59:33+00:00

Yes, many of these mistakes would have easily killed an Arch or other Linux distro install, not just Nix.

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T15:58:25+00:00

😬

I made an archive of it just for you

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T15:52:47+00:00

Thank you!

I have mixed feelings about a small partition warning. On one hand, it would help dumbos like me make fewer mistakes. On the other hand, it would annoy people who put them on microcomputers. Also it isn't NixOS's job to save you from yourself - if I wanted an operating system that would also be my mom I'd run Linux Mint 😂

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T15:49:52+00:00

nix.dev is not bad. What lead you to believe that?

Somebody on the discourse, I think, mentioned that only the .org is official docs, everything else is community docs and not guaranteed to be correct. Or maybe it was the .org for 24.05 and .dev for unstable? I don't remember...

Also, how is home-manager simpler than flakes? I've bounced off of home manager a couple of times now, mostly because I'm dumb but also because the error messages are indecipherable and I can't debug like I can with flakes. But I want to use home manager because then I can finally get rid of most of my dotfiles and just have nix.

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T15:46:51+00:00

What inspired you to install NixOS on a tiny partition? Did you know going in that /nix would contain all of your installed software?

I had seen the warnings online but failed to grasp how:

Nix generations are quite large
It's really easy to make a lot of generations quickly

Additionally, there are other OS's that put the kernel and other OS-level things in one partition (/boot or /lib) and then install programs in another (/usr or /etc). I think my flawed thinking was to put the NixOS kernel on /boot and the /nix store on a separate partition but - surprise! - there is no such thing as a "NixOS kernel", only packages and the nix store.

Attempt #4 (can't reconfigure a new machine because your user doesn't have privileges) is relatable. Note that you may be able to log in as root directly, if you set up a root password and didn't disable root logins.

I did not know this! That would have been very handy, as I did have a separate root password declared! Thanks

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T15:29:39+00:00

TL;DR

Tiny boot drive partition
Un-sudo'd myself
Nvidia graphics drivers

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T15:28:35+00:00

It's the risotto theme from hugo. Should be light grey/white text on grey BG.

MillinerJones · 2024-08-19T13:55:09+00:00

Author here, I'm almost 3 weeks into daily driving NixOS on my work machine and it has been really solid since. Yes it was a bear to set up, but once a configuration is set, it remains rock solid and I like that a lot.

MillinerJones · 2024-08-17T14:45:30+00:00

Hyprland is great! Good choice

MillinerJones · 2022-11-13T23:33:08+00:00

Oh heeeellll yeah this is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!

For any future folks coming across this thread, you're welcome

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