Using Nix with Fedora's Immutable Distros

Disclaimer: This is my personal setup. It works well for me, but you might want to just use NixOS.

Installing Nix and Home Manager

I’ve come up with a script for installing Nix using the Determinate Installer. I love using this because It Just Works^TM for Linux and MacOS.

 1#!/bin/sh
 2echo "Installing Nix..."
 3curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install
 4. /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/etc/profile.d/nix-daemon.sh
 5
 6echo "Updating Nix Channels..."
 7nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
 8nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager
 9nix-channel --update
10
11echo "Installing Home Manager..."
12nix-shell '<home-manager>' -A install
13home-manager switch

This script:

1. Installs nix
2. Adds the unstable channel
3. Adds the Home Manager channel
4. Updates all our channels
5. Installs home-manager
6. Activates home-manager

If you’re not familiar with Home Manager, you’ll want to follow the official guide.

Multiple Machines

I use my nix config on my personal desktop, personal laptop, and my work laptop, but each one requires a slightly different config. To get around this, I have a single common.nix file then an individual nix file for each machine.

1❯ ll .config/home-manager/
2total 24K
3-rw-r--r--. 1 godmaire godmaire  133 Apr  4 15:20 artemis.nix
4-rw-r--r--. 1 godmaire godmaire 1.1K Apr  6 08:42 charles.nix
5-rw-r--r--. 1 godmaire godmaire 2.6K Jun 15 10:37 common.nix
6-rw-r--r--. 1 godmaire godmaire 5.0K May 14 18:04 diana.nix

If we take a peek inside artemix.nix, we can see how it imports common.nix and which settings it needs.

1{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:
2
3{
4  imports = [ ./common.nix ];
5
6  home.username = "godmaire";
7  home.homeDirectory = "/var/home/godmaire";
8}

To actually use this config on Artemis, we can symlink it to home.nix.

1❯ ll .config/home-manager/home.nix
2lrwxrwxrwx. 1 godmaire godmaire 9 Apr  4 15:19 .config/home-manager/home.nix -> artemis.nix

The only things we need to set in artemis.nix or any other machine specific file are the home.username and home.homeDirectory. Everything else is in common.nix. For my work machine, which runs MacOS, I have a few other customizations.

 1{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:
 2
 3{
 4  imports = [ ./common.nix ];
 5
 6  home.username = "rgodmaire";
 7  home.homeDirectory = "/Users/rgodmaire";
 8
 9  # Overrides
10  programs.emacs.package = lib.mkForce pkgs.emacs-macport;
11
12  home.packages = with pkgs; [
13    go
14    gopls
15    delve
16    gotests
17    gotools
18
19    python3
20    pyright
21    ruff
22
23    shellcheck
24  ];
25
26  programs.alacritty = {
27      enable = true;
28      settings = {
29          font = {
30              normal.family = "Hack Nerd Font Mono";
31              size = 12.0;
32            };
33
34          colors = {
35              primary = {
36                  background = "#282828";
37                  foreground = "#ebdbb2";
38                };
39
40              normal = {
41                black   = "#282828";
42                red     = "#cc241d";
43                green   = "#98971a";
44                yellow  = "#d79921";
45                blue    = "#458588";
46                magenta = "#b16286";
47                cyan    = "#689d6a";
48                white   = "#ebdbb2";
49                };
50            };
51        };
52    };
53
54}

The interesting things here are the additional packages, alacritty, and the different package for emacs. We use lib.mkForce to overwrite the existing setting in common.nix. Everything else, such as home.packages merges with common.nix.

Why Not Use NixOS?

I started using Feodra Silverblue before I started using Nix. By the time I started entertaining the idea of using NixOS, I already had this setup. Either way, I’d need to have most of this in place due to me being forced to use a Macbook for work (Linux was banned 😢).

I now use NixOS full time. Drink the koolaid.