Comment by karlshea
4 hours ago
I tried getting Nix working a couple of months ago and ditched it because changing some Tower settings updates the global gitconfig (as it should in this circumstance) and Nix would wipe them out.
All of it seemed way too annoying compared to just having a dotfiles repo, and if it couldn’t handle the Tower/gitconfig issue I know for sure everything else I was going to run into wasn’t worth it.
For what it's worth, you can put a git repo inside a nix configuration / flake folder and it will tell you the repo is dirty. 'nh' also has commands to tell you about state. But it shouldn't require outside tools.
The way I do it is have config files in my Nix config folder, then use Nix to symlink them and I use git to make me aware of state changes, that I might want to make reproducible. But that's just me being used to my old git ways, using 'nh' gives much more clarity.
The "true" Nix way is putting the entire contents of whatever config file in a .nix file, then erasing the original config and have Nix recreate the config (preferably read-only) in place. You become truly reproducible but for obvious reasons applications get mad when you make their config file read only.