Landing Headfirst The foray into NixOS was painful, and while there wasn’t much I found for newcomer guidance here’s what would have helped me:
Start small, use the installer on a real system or VM to build on Said differently, don’t start with a beefy configuration that will inevitably require troubleshooting Yes, this is obvious advice, but I could not resist the allure of creating a “perfect” configuration As of 2023-11, the installer did not play well with LUKS It is worth learning how to manually partition disks properly Make /boot large (5GB+), or don’t put it on a dedicated partition I ended up needing to wipe and re-partition due to a full boot partition; a well documented issue that shockingly isn’t resolved in the installer When using -p to name generations, don’t use spaces nixos-rebuild will happily give you the rope, invalid generations won’t be cleaned out by garbage collection and you’ll find yourself unable to upgrade with a full /boot The following are a bit tongue-in-cheek that I have yet to do them as of this rambling:
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