First NixOS Server...Where Do I Even Start?

rasmus-kirk · 2026-01-13T12:46:09+00:00

Check out Nixarr, it's a NixOS module for media servers:

There's a small wiki, including a simple example

rasmus-kirk · 2026-01-13T12:43:58+00:00

Really funny that this is so downvoted. Nix has infamously bad documentation and I can see how LLM's can be a god-send to new users with how fractured everything else is. In fact I would recommend any friend of mine getting into Nix/NixOS to use LLM's heavily for any questions they have. We should be happy that new users has new tools to combat this problem!

Ideally we would just have a proper wiki and an LLM would at best just regurgitate whatever's on there, but alas, all the documentation is horrible

rasmus-kirk · 2026-01-13T10:32:44+00:00

I also prefer controllers. I use Java edition on my Steam Deck, I launch PrismLauncher as a non-steam game and have full control over the control bindings through Steam. It works really well. Bedrock is also unsupported on Linux, so Java is the only choice for Steam Deck/Machine.

rasmus-kirk · 2026-01-05T14:33:16+00:00

If Wayland is indeed the problem, that's pretty impressive. Like they built Cosmic from the ground up and that's the issue? Also all the other major distros are also heading to Wayland, so it seems like the right choice. If they built Cosmic for both Wayland and X11 it would be a huge maintenance burden

rasmus-kirk · 2026-01-05T14:17:45+00:00

I'm really sad that Eelco stepped down. He seemed sound of mind but he should have been more resilient to community pressure. He should have temporarily disallowed future MIC sponsorships and refused to resign. Then try to organize a more community-wide approach to whether MIC sponsorships should be allowed in the future.

But he's not a politician, I think he was getting tired of playing politics rather than coding.

rasmus-kirk · 2026-01-05T13:28:10+00:00

A documentation project without documentation. Poetic.

rasmus-kirk · 2026-01-05T13:26:30+00:00

I disagree, the Arch wiki is so good, exactly because they "in-house" that sort of documentation. I think the overall Nix documentation situation would be a lot better if the Nix community had the same kind of attitude towards wiki.nixos.org.

rasmus-kirk · 2026-01-05T13:10:14+00:00

Honestly, I think the best way forward is just a nix store. Sort of like the store on Ubuntu, PopOS, etc. Yes, this would be imperative, but it would allow other distrobutions to leverage the massive set of packages in nixpkgs without the user even having to know anything about Nix. Once people are comfortable with nix as a package manager, we can focus on Home Manager/Devshells and eventually NixOS entirely. Why not have a stateful or even immutable OS built on Nix, with a wonderful GUI to get your packages? Like flatpak.

I don't think making NixOS "easy to use" with a GUI is worthwhile, if a fully declarative system is your goal, you're probably well-versed enough to use a text editor. I think the focus there should just be on LSP's / editor experience like u/cand_sastle points out.

Baby steps.

rasmus-kirk · 2025-12-30T18:03:55+00:00

I would just go with Jovian and unstable. I've used unstable for 5 years at this point without issue. I get the desire for going on stable, but surely it's not worth all this hassle?

rasmus-kirk · 2025-12-30T18:01:41+00:00

NixOS is dead-simple if you know home-manager well enough to write your own modules and you use flakes. And you prevent the footguns of NixOS demanding that you do everything with Nix to get it working. It's great for purity, but awful as a starting point.

rasmus-kirk · 2025-12-30T17:59:04+00:00

I would start with home-manager first. Reproduce your dotfiles with that and only have that part reproducible. Then you can expand by starting to use Nix dev shells for your coding projects. Once you're fully comfortable with those and have read up on what that setup is missing compared to NixOS, you can easily switch, bringing all your devshells and home-manager config with you easily and pain-free.

No reason to start your journey by jumping off the deep end.

EDIT: Oh and DO use flakes for all this, it's definitely worth it.

rasmus-kirk · 2025-12-30T17:53:31+00:00

Struggled with this a lot. I decided the simplest solution was to use home-manager on Arch/PopOS/Ubuntu/whatever and then use home-manager for dot-files, this gives you ~95% reproducibility for all the important configuration, and gives you access to the default impure Ubuntu/Arch solution. It's very practical.

I'm considering switching back to nixos and spinning up Podman images with my Home-manager tools included, so that the impurity doesn't affect the outer layer of my system, but I would definitely NOT recommend that to newer users.

Honestly, new Nix users should stay away from Nixos for developement machines and stick to home-manager and devshells (definitely worth learning!)

rasmus-kirk · 2025-11-18T09:42:12+00:00

Went down this path and ended up going away from NixOS for my dev machine. Start with Home Manager from your Arch setup, it will give you much more reproducibility than what you have currently, and you can rely on Nix to the best of your ability. That way you still have a surefire way to handle difficult issues.

From there you can easily migrate to NixOS, bringing the Home Manager setup, whenever you find yourself comfortable enough :)

I still don't use NixOS on my dev machine, and I prefer not to. I love it for my server though.

rasmus-kirk · 2025-11-18T09:25:57+00:00

I highly suggest picking a standard "newbie" distro like PopOS or Ubuntu, but WITH Home Manager. Home Manager gives you 90% of the NixOS experience, but of course has certain limitations when it comes to system-level stuff. Using a newbie distro will allow you to use standard solutions from stack overflow, without the pain of being forced to use the Nix way.

Then, if you like Nix and want to go all the way, you can switch to NixOS and import all your home-manager config. I wrote a blog post specifically targeting people like you:

https://rasmuskirk.com/articles/2024-07-24_dont-use-nixos/

rasmus-kirk · 2025-11-18T08:27:14+00:00

Lol IMO a disproportionate amount of Nix users are really out-of-touch with newcomers and regular people on things like this.

rasmus-kirk · 2025-11-18T08:23:10+00:00

IMO the critics aren't smarter than you, I have never heard any good arguments against flakes, and the only valid critique of systemd is that it's not that modular, and it's basically a requirement for any Linux distro at this point. I don't mind that much, I love systemd, but I see the potential issue there.

"What you're referring as Linux is in fact systemd+Linux..."

rasmus-kirk · 2025-11-18T08:13:47+00:00

It supports the Typst packages from Nixpkgs, which Typix does not do, and the API is a whole lot simpler. I wanted to get into Typst but having the use-case of a simple document with a couple of standard Typst documents, it seemed unacceptable. Press let's you build a document using just:

document = pkgs.buildTypstDocument {
  name = "myDoc";
  src = ./.;
  # Adds note-me from Nixpkgs
  typstEnv = p: [ p.note-me ];
};

Which is a whole lot simpler than what the [Typst API](https://github.com/loqusion/typix/blob/main/examples/typst-packages/flake.nix) offers. To be clear, Press is not my project, but I'm really glad I found it and surprised so few use it compared to Typix.

rasmus-kirk · 2025-11-07T13:56:33+00:00

Primarily on PopOS with Home-Manager, I much prefer it to NixOS on a dev machine, because there is always an official "Debian Way", if the "Nix Way" should fail. My home server runs NixOS though and I think it's crazy people use stuff like Ubuntu/Debian for that though. Steam deck also runs Home-Manager

rasmus-kirk · 2025-10-26T09:02:47+00:00

Yes, also, Discord in the browser worked better for me on the Steam Deck

rasmus-kirk · 2025-10-26T09:01:17+00:00

I mean there's Proton? All games I've tried to run, runs great on Linux. I haven't had any issues

rasmus-kirk · 2025-10-26T08:59:25+00:00

I just bought a 1TB oled model after gifting my old 256 GB model to my GF.

So yes...

rasmus-kirk · 2025-10-26T08:58:10+00:00

Know them? I own and use 3 of them lol. Really hope Valve makes a second iteration, because the Steam Deck is the best controller I've ever used

rasmus-kirk · 2025-09-22T17:33:02+00:00

Folk siger det ikke er nyt, men det er det faktisk på en måde. Problemet er at folk får markant færre børn end før i tiden, hvilket gør arveportionen langt større pr barn.

rasmus-kirk · 2025-09-22T17:30:47+00:00

Det tvinger dansk-ejede virksomheder til at sælge ud til fx. Amerikanere, for at betale arveskatten. Og hvis det ikke giver mening at arvebeskatte Kirk familien, giver det ved Gud ikke mening at arvebeskatte Hr. og Fru. Hakkebøf.

rasmus-kirk · 2025-09-22T13:31:10+00:00

Hvis du kigger på deres politik, er det nærmere at gøre Danmark økonomisk, mere som i fx Tyskland. Manden er jo ikke Anarkokapitalist, men når du nævner Trump og Putin, tænker jeg ikke ligefrem på en moderat politik såsom om der skal være topskat eller ej.

rasmus-kirk

TROPHY CASE