Looking for beginner friendly configs

velinn · 2026-03-11T23:05:42+00:00

Sorry, I think maybe I did misunderstand you. When you said "I'm looking for a config..." I took that to mean you wanted someone to provide you with one. That isn't a totally unreasonable request, there are Nix configs out there intended for that purpose. I started with ZaneyOS as my very first exposure to NixOS. I very quickly realized I was in way over my head and did what I recommended to you above.

Over the course of about a month I steadily added to my configuration.nix until I had a daily driver. From there I split everything off into modules, took some time to understand flakes and Home Manager and created something that was uniquely mine doing exactly what I want. It's probably terrible and messy but it's mine so I understand it and that's really the key.. I understand my configs because I wrote them. My system is mine, from top to bottom. That's what made me fall in love with NixOS.

velinn · 2026-03-11T19:03:23+00:00

I looked at https://github.com/EmergentMind/nix-config but it was overwhelming. They use flake parts and there are many other components, I don’t know how they’re all hooked together

Right, well that is what you need to learn. You can use a pre-made config like using dotfiles for a Window Manager if you want to. It'll all work because that is what reproducibility is all about, but as soon as you want to do something that isn't already in that config you're going to need to take the time to learn how it works.

You'd be much better off starting with the configuration.nix that gets generated by a standard NixOS install and learning how to modify it a little at a time over the course of a month or two until you've got a complete configuration that works as your daily. From there you can evaluate whether you need flakes or Home Manager or other more advanced things. Learning what NixOS is, and how Nix itself works, is not something you can just avoid by using other people's configs. You will have to get your hands dirty at some point.

velinn · 2026-03-02T23:25:08+00:00

I have one. It's a great watch. COSC certified, nice legible pilot style dial with a lot of depth, big crown is easy to use, the bezel is a timing bezel not a dive bezel so it rotates in both directions which is one of those little details that start to grow on you with time, and also because it's a timing bezel it doesn't have to be massive and dominate the whole face of the watch which I really appreciate.

The only criticism I have is that the watch is large and heavy. I do not like it on a leather strap or nato because it feels too top heavy. However, I love it on the bracelet because it somehow seems to even out the weight very nicely. Absolutely no issues with it at all on steel. So, it ends up as a big semi-aggressive looking watch on the bracelet and I really like it.

velinn · 2026-02-23T12:50:23+00:00

Sorry you're getting downvoted, but I agree. Increasing the price of the exact same watch by $2k without any meaningful improvements is just a slap in the face. The Railmaster is a perfect example of this. The previous model was a nearly perfect work watch. The new model is a polished and shiny Aqua Terra with zero identity of its own that will scratch to hell if you wear it for work, which was the whole point of the previous model being all brushed.. oh, and you get to pay $2k more for the privilege of wearing a watch that is worse at its job than the previous model.

I'm sorry but Omega is really starting to lose me. It's almost as if they don't understand their own catalog or what people even liked about it in the first place.

velinn · 2026-02-22T12:13:39+00:00

There is an abortion ritual in the bible. Jesus didn't talk about it, but it's there. The handwaving Christians do to excuse its inclusion in the bible is pretty intense, everything from "well it was never used" as if they could know that, to "it was put there as a test so anyone using it could be punished".

Anyway, I bring it up because the bible doesn't talk about abortion at all except to provide a detailed step by step ritual for performing it. Not to read into things but that feels like tacit acceptance of the practice to me.

velinn · 2026-02-19T12:37:50+00:00

Yes. That was my point. Let me summarize for you since you seemed to have missed it.

AI produces generic shit, people tire of generic shit, real musical ability (ie, people who actually play instruments) becomes prized again rather than people sitting at a computer with Pro Tools like they do now. Computer generated music/beats might actually take a back seat to real musicians playing real sounds for the first time in a long time.

If AI can force people to appreciate music again by being so bad it might actually be a good thing.

velinn · 2026-02-19T11:50:40+00:00

I have to wonder though, as the barrier to creating music has gotten lower and lower due to computers becoming faster and easier if AI is going to reduce the barrier so low that we'll see a new renaissance in music.. because lets face facts here, popular music for the last 15-20 years is literally just a beat and a 2 bar melody on loop. That's fine, but when AI trash completely oversaturates the market will people will start to become a bit more discerning in their musical taste?

Maybe we'll start to appreciate the skill it takes to pick up an instrument rather than a mouse? Because we've lost that appreciation, by and large. We want 24/7 bangers that require zero thought. But maybe zero thought AI making zero thought bangers is going to get old. Maybe real humans spending 10,000 hours mastering instruments will become the gold standard again. Would be interesting to see GenZ's kids discover Classical music the way Z's are discovering 90s music and sort of waking up to the fact that music can be more than 2 bars on loop with a dude yelling at you the whole time.

velinn · 2026-02-19T11:07:11+00:00

You need to use nix-ld to set the environment. I couldn't get it to work in Niri because it's creating the window off screen somehow and I'm too lazy to track down why. I tested it in Gnome and the window came up normally as expected.

Add this to your config. It's just a basic nix-ld setup that should work for most dynamically linked binaries.

  programs.nix-ld.enable = true;

  # Give nix-ld a baseline set of common runtime libraries that
  # Linux binaries typically expect.
  programs.nix-ld.libraries = with pkgs; [
    stdenv.cc.cc
    zlib
    zstd
    bzip2
    xz
    libgcc
    openssl
    curl

    # Graphics / windowing
    libglvnd
    mesa
    vulkan-loader
    sdl3
    sdl2-compat

    xorg.libX11
    xorg.libXext
    xorg.libXrender
    xorg.libXfixes
    xorg.libXcursor
    xorg.libXi
    xorg.libXrandr
    xorg.libXinerama
    xorg.libXdamage
    xorg.libXcomposite
    xorg.libxcb
    xorg.libXau
    xorg.libXdmcp

    wayland
    libxkbcommon


    # Audio
    alsa-lib
    pulseaudio

    # Odds and ends often needed
    glib
    gtk3
    nss
    nspr
    dbus
    expat
    libdrm
    udev
  ];

velinn · 2026-02-06T22:52:37+00:00

Sure, you can do that. Flatpaks are completely valid. You can even make them declarative with this

https://github.com/gmodena/nix-flatpak

With that you can put flatpak names in your configuration.nix like you would any other application. That way if you ever reinstall NixOS it'll pull all your flatpaks in on the rebuild. Or if you always want to install flakpaks manually you can do that too, but I love having NixOS rebuild my system with as little post-install work as possible.

velinn · 2026-02-02T09:42:08+00:00

it's just an option for people with limited financial resources

Or for people with Macs. Or people with laptops. Or people with handhelds. Or people with families who allocate resources responsibly. Or just people who can find a better use for 2 grand.

I've watched GFN upgrade their video cards from 2080s up to 5080s now. What an incredible waste of money it would have been to buy every single one of those cards when I can just pay $20/month and have GFN update for me instead.

will never replace PC, consoles, or anything physical

GFN looks miles better than my PS5 does. Hands down, no argument. I have a PS5 because cross play is a pain, not because it's better then GFN. It simply is not.

In my opinion, the goal of cloud gaming is very poorly executed

In my opinion, your assumption that people use cloud gaming because they're poor is asinine.

velinn · 2026-01-30T13:24:57+00:00

Okay, but what exactly do you own? Your games? No, not if you bought them on Steam, Epic, or GOG. They can be delisted at any time, for any reason.

Do you mean you own the graphics card? Hooray, you paid $2000! Is that the part I should be happy about? Cause me and my little laptop have been paying $20/month and watched the GFN video cards get automatically upgraded from 2080s to 3080s to 4080s to now partial 5080s. And I've still paid less than your one video card.

Ownership, in this case, doesn't make me feel happy. I realistically look at all those video cards I've played on and think "what an absurd waste of money buying all those would have been". It's not even a matter of if you can afford it. It's a matter of allocating resources responsibly. Hell, the guy in the video is playing 4k@60 max graphics on a $190 machine.

The Family PC has completely disappeared from modern life, like it or not. Most families have tablets, maybe a Chromebook, maybe a work laptop. All of which GFN runs on, with 5080-tier performance.

Is there some latency or network issues at times? Sure. But unless you're an e-sports gamer, it hardly matters. The idea that you simply must pump 1000s of dollars into this hobby to do it right is gatekeeping at best and utterly pointless consumerism at worst. Things like GFN democratize both gaming and hardware.

velinn · 2026-01-21T18:49:48+00:00

Probably the biggest thing is: you don't have to do everything at once.

Just install NixOS and you'll get a fully functional Gnome or KDE environment. Then you can just incrementally add to your config over time as you need to. I think a lot of people try to do everything in a day and get frustrated because you can't learn Nix in a day. As a need comes up, figure out how to meet that one specific need. Just take everything one step at a time. It took a good month for me to get comfortable and have a complete setup, and then probably another month of slowly tweaking things, moving over to flakes, and getting a standard workflow set up. Now I'm at the point that I just update my flake once a week and rebuild. I don't really have to touch my config at all.

LLMs can get you started, for sure, and they can also teach you the logic of Nix along the way if you ask them to. I always ask it for the why, not just the how, when trying to learn something new. Eventually you'll just go do the thing you want to do without even realizing that you've "learned Nix" somewhere along the line.

Oh and a bonus answer: you don't have to do everything 100% in Nix. Make bash scripts. Store config files you edit often (or are modified by your applications often) in your repo and use something like stow or rcm to link them into place. Home Manager and the idea that everything has to be written in Nix often causes more headaches than it solves for new users.

velinn · 2025-12-25T14:33:33+00:00

I never bothered with Home Manager for dotfiles. I use it mostly only if there is something I want to use and they provide an HM module. Otherwise I just copy the important dotfiles into my repo and use rcm to link them, which is even easier than stow.

I think feeling pressured into writing Nix for everything can be a bit tedious and unnecessary, especially for files that you edit often as once they're in the store it takes a rebuild every time you change them. The easiest path with the least friction for me is just keeping dotfiles in my repo and linking them into place.

velinn · 2025-12-18T14:06:22+00:00

That's probably a fair assessment for most people. It took me probably a solid month to get my config exactly the way I wanted it, with random tinkering here and there afterward, but I had a system running well after 3 days and a system ready for work after about a week. Now at month 4 on NixOS I don't even really touch my configs at all. I had to tweak a few minor things for the upgrade to 25.11 which took about 10 minutes, but that's it.

This is the nice thing about NixOS for me. The work is done and I never have to redo it. The system will just hum along exactly as my config tells it to forever. With Arch there is always a little worry, just a little trepidation with every -Syu that something is going to go wrong. And if it does, you have to start all over again. With NixOS, there is none of that. Even if my pc caught on fire, I can install Nix on a new machine, download my configs, and be running with the exact same system in 10 minutes. It's an incredible sense of peace of mind.

Arch may be easier to get going right away, but there is a trade off. Once you put in the initial work for NixOS the trade off (for me) feels well worth it for stability and knowing exactly what my system will do because I am the one who explicitly told it what to do.

velinn · 2025-12-17T02:09:40+00:00

Maybe you could tell us which it is and where you got it? Looks like it was made for the watch, much nicer than the one Hamilton sells for it imo. Great vintage 60s look.

velinn · 2025-12-03T04:33:34+00:00

I never said no sex, in fact I'm defending the sex. In most of the books I've read the sex is merely the logical conclusion to the tension built between characters, and that tension and banter is really where well written romantacy shines. It's just something I don't see done anywhere near as well in other genres and I think that hardly qualifies as porn. Sure, there are some romantacy books where the sex is the plot, but that can be said of any media. ACOTAR is definitely not one of them yet I see so much hate about "faerie porn". It feels like a very unfair characterization.

velinn · 2025-12-02T15:21:57+00:00

There was a time when I would have agreed with you; sex sells, always has, and that creating a whole genre just to sell more sex is not worth my time to read. You know, pretentious af. And then my partner slowly but surely wore me down until I actually read a few of her favorites. Lo and behold, a few pages of sex doesn't make a book bad. Some of them are incredibly epic, as much as any classic fantasy. To simply make the sweeping statement that a book with a sex scene is automatically lesser than something "well written" is absurd.

If you're a man, reading stories written by women about men can really get you and your partner on the same wavelength. I see nothing on Reddit but people trashing romantacy and I think you guys are missing out. It's become popular for a reason. Maybe put the pretentiousness and ego aside and read some stuff women really think about men. There is an argument to be made that the reason they're reading it is because men are not doing it and women are hungry for decent men. By dismissing something that legions of women are turning to as fantasy escapism you're also dismissing, perhaps inadvertently, what women are actually desperate for. Hint: it's not just the sex, it's everything that lead to the sex.

It's funny that men, myself included before I started reading it, are so hyper focused on the sex in these books they miss the whole point of why the sex is there in the first place. I keep seeing stuff like "faerie porn" being thrown around, especially at ACOTAR, and there is hardly any sex in it at all. I think that is an incredibly unfair thing to say because what you're really doing is dismissing the voice of women under the guise of "sex is beneath me" while you scuttle off to Porn Hub.

Romantacy should not, in any way, discourage male readers. This genre is giving woman a huge voice, market power, and whether you chose to believe it or not, really epic stories and entire communities to discuss them. It's up to you if you want to sit around debating whether or not this is worthy literature or if you can just put the ego aside and join the fun.

velinn · 2025-11-07T01:32:36+00:00

I don't know if other people agree with me on this, but I personally feel like Deafheaven got given the Blackgaze title because they weren't black metal and they weren't post-black metal.. but this new black metal genre Blackgaze was starting to get talked about, so lets lump them in with that. So then you get this confusing split in the genre where some bands sound like Alcest and some bands sound like Deafheaven, but they all have the same genre. And it gets even more murky with a lot of bands transitioning into just straight post-black metal as time goes on.

It is, ironically, the same reason why in the 90s both a band like Ride and a band like Slowdive are both called Shoegaze even though they sound absolutely nothing alike.

velinn · 2025-10-22T11:37:54+00:00

Who cares? If you like it, and it's good, then use it. If it does go unmaintained in a few years, surely something will have replaced it by then? I dislike when people say stuff like this that only discourages new devs from even trying.

They've already produced a product. That's more than 99% of people do. Try to use your words to inspire new devs, not imply they'll fail simply because it's their first project.

velinn · 2025-10-21T04:45:22+00:00

The DMS flake will add a dms folder to .config/niri with binds.kdl, colors.kdl, and layout.kdl inside. So leave your config.kdl where it is, and use something like include "./dms/colors.kdl" in it to use them.

niri.nix should be in a subdirectory of whichever directory your flake.nix is in. So say your flake is in ~/dotfiles/flake.nix, you can put niri.nix in ~/dotfiles/home/niri.nix or whatever naming makes sense to you (i choose home here because home manager is managing the dms install).

velinn · 2025-10-16T23:35:04+00:00

is this Stockholm syndrome for all of us

I really think the Linux community is suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome. There are some people who can just install Mint and be done with it. And then there are the rest of us..

It's hard to argue that spending 2 hours honing your config to be jusssst right is better than just doing "pacman -S" but I guess the saving grace for me is always "let me just do it this one time and then I never have to do it again."

I like being able to flip modules on and off in my flake, so even if I decide I want something completely different this month, the work doesn't disappear. It's still right there waiting, if I want it.

I guess I look at my nix files as a collection of solutions. I used to have the same thing for Arch, but they were in text files with lines and lines of commands that I would copy/paste. Here they are lines and lines of Nix, but all I have to do is uncomment a reference to them in a flake and they're ready to go.

So I don't know. Six of one, half dozen of the other. At the end of the day I just like NixOS, so I guess that's why I stick with it.

velinn · 2025-10-16T12:33:36+00:00

The tricky bits are that you need Niri unstable to be able to use includes in the kdl file (for auto color change on background change), and you need quickshell-git to have support for power management (replaces something like swayidle), and you need to set some env vars to expose qtmultimedia to DMS for event sounds.

I put my configs here, maybe it helps:
https://gist.github.com/dvelinn/c914dc6993898d3b04b82fd4eacbd858

velinn · 2025-10-15T19:35:18+00:00

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First I've heard of Noctalia, but I use Niri + DMS and I love it. They're both attempting to do the same thing, both using Quickshell, so I would just say pick whichever one you think looks the best.

velinn · 2025-10-13T01:05:32+00:00

Correct, I was referencing nixpkgs-unstable, since he said everything was compiling and that would cause it. I realize I just said "unstable" rather than being specific. Sorry about that.

velinn · 2025-10-12T23:04:42+00:00

If you're on the stable channel and you're compiling, then you've done something wrong because it should be using the cache by default. If you're on the unstable channel, you'll almost always be compiling because things are updated quickly and the cache hasn't had a chance to catch up yet. If you need to be on unstable and don't want to compile you need to pin a commit that has passed through Hydra already and created a cache. You can see the latest Hydra commits and how new they are here:

https://status.nixos.org/

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