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Comment by trenchpilgrim

1 year ago

When I had one nix computer, I wanted to customize it heavily.

Now I have many nix computers and I want them consistent and with only the most necessary packages installed.

For anyone else reading this comment who was confused because this seems like the opposite of what you'd expect about Nix: Hacker News ate the asterisks and turned them into italics.

Besides many nix computers I also have wife, dog, children, chores, shopping to be done. Unlike when I was young engineer I could stay all night fiddling with bash scripts and environments.

  • What does your wife, dog, children, chores, and shopping have to do with custom configuration and scripts? Just set up a Git repo online, put your files there, and take a couple of minutes to improve it incrementally when you encounter inconveniences. And just like that, you made your life easier for a marginal effort.

I don't get why this is a problem. Just stick all your configs in a git repo and clone it wherever you need it.

  • I run two OSes. So two variants.

    Some are desktops, some laptops, some servers. Different packages installed, different hardware. Three more variants.

    Yes, I do have a script to set up my environment, but it already has a lot of conditional behavior to handle these five total variants. And I don't want to have to re-test the scripts and re-sync often.