Comment by dhon_
3 days ago
Claude code/Git/NixOS is such a nice system to work with.
You can build your entire system from a worktree and merge if it works or boot the old generation if it doesn't. This is great for trialing new kernels, NixOS releases, or alternate Window managers, and rolling back is trivial.
One downside is that there is only one stable NixOS at a time, and no LTS. However in practice I haven't found this to be an issue across multiple desktops, servers and SBCs.
Agreed. One additional thing I do is I have the same setup on my main work workstation and also my old work laptop, so when I do a big swath of package updates (about once a month) I do it on my "scratch monkey" first and make sure nothing obvious breaks. I started doing this after a GNOME update broke my GDM (as you say, until I booted the old generation, but still was a work interruption).
I'm using NixOS "latest" on my workstation, for no particularly good reason.
One success I had was with building up a custom vim setup. I had previously been using Lunar and Astro as an opionated vim distro with LSP+Treesitter and some other "table stakes" things a modern editor should have. But there wasn't a clear way to install Astro in NixOS when I tried it manually. So I just told Claude Code what plugins and settings I wanted in neovim, and now I have a single file that fully describes my vim setup. Before with Astro and Lunar the configs were spread out all over a bunch of files.
I was also able to get Claude Code to bundle up gitbutler-cli, which I wanted to try but so far have not. It builds it from source because there was no existing derivation. It takes a stunningly long time to build, but otherwise it has worked very well in my simple testing of it. Plus, I can build on my powerful laptop and then use that to seed my old, slow ThinkPad T470s and even slower chromebook that I also put my config on.
Yeah my setup is pretty similar, I use a shared repo for my work laptop and home desktop. I test out new setups at home, and typically run nixpkgs-unstable there for a few weeks before migrating the work machine.
I use nixvim for generating my neovim config (and I have a flake output for running that on MacOS where I don't use nix a lot) although I've been pairing back my plugins lately as I find I'm spending less time in the editor.