News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Show HN: MyNixOS – Create and share Nix and NixOS configurations. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: MyNixOS – Create and share Nix and NixOS configu... by dack on Sunday November 27, 2022 @12:33PM (#33764747)
Sounds great! I currently run a NixOS desktop but I still struggle quite a bit with the documentation and discoverability of configuration/language. That's one of the biggest pain points in my eyes, so a UI like you have could really make that simpler. Letting users introspect what settings are available and how they work seems like one way of making things more discoverable (but not necessarily making a specific wizard for a specific build, since that doesn't seem scalable or generalizable).

That said, I also agree with you that having reusable modules that are documented would help, and being able to clone and copy/paste settings + seeing examples would too. Good luck!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: MyNixOS – Create and share Nix and NixOS configu... by eterps on Sunday November 27, 2022 @12:54PM (#33764923)
Does a nix language server improve discoverability?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: MyNixOS – Create and share Nix and NixOS configu... by mynameisvlad on Sunday November 27, 2022 @01:23PM (#33765201)
1000% this. I spun up a nixos VM to play around and love the concept, especially things like declarative home directories.

But it’s impossible to discover all the various things you can do.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: MyNixOS – Create and share Nix and NixOS configu... by bitmapper on Sunday November 27, 2022 @02:31PM (#33765886)
I find the options search to be generally suitable for that case https://search.nixos.org/options
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: MyNixOS – Create and share Nix and NixOS configu... by dack on Sunday November 27, 2022 @05:21PM (#33767620)
Yeah that's super helpful for NixOS configuration options. What trips me up more is configuring particular packages. Usually it's where I want to configure a particular version or github commit of a package for some reason (usually I want a bug fix).

However, a bunch of packages are defined in some bespoke way with various custom config inputs that generate other bits of config and generally are hard to understand. Thinking it through, I'm not sure it's possible for the OP's tool to solve this particular problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]