I've started diving into Nix OS and I genuinely can't stop I get when it comes to nixos that plenty of people out there are quite annoying with nios like if you've hung around just on the internet a lot of people their only argument towards NYX OS is simply that the people that use it are very annoying and very excited about NX OS as someone who's been using it I'll explain why it people get kind of excited about it also before we dive in I do want to say thank you for watching if you haven't already hit that like button consider subscribing also these fantastic people on the screen right now support me over on patreon financially which means a lot and means I have you know the time available to do this and also money to do cool things like merch which you'll find that down in the description as well so let's go ahead and Jump On In if I switch over to my desktop here you'll see we have nixos here I guess I should prove that it is in fact nixos so let me just run a neofetch and so you can see I am in fact running nixos I am running the stable 23.11 release and we've got you know hyperland running nothing too special let me go over here and let's talk about kind of the cool thing I figured out you can do there is quite quite a few cool things you can do with nixos when it comes to your boot nyos to boot only needs SL Boot and sln folders so you can here this this article is actually I'll link it down below but this is a very popular NX OS article uh talks about you know running NX OS uh with a small persistent you know folder inside of your NYX folder that builds out into your system uh in this one they're talking about using z uh ZFS and pools uh here in this one it's just running temp FS uh for your root partition so there's a lot of cool things with xos you can mess around with and do that is neat uh I mean I wouldn't say this is a thing that you can do that means you need to be using nixos no it's just another cool thing that you can do with nyos now if you're unfamiliar with what NYX OS is at all it is a declarative drro or Linux Dro I guess would be the best way of putting it you define your system in a few configuration files uh two by default default and those will be placed inside of your Etsy nixos directory when you install it when you go to install nios and you go to their downloads page you will actually see uh let me go back over here and we'll load up their downloads page why not uh if you go to nixos you'll see a download page if you go here they've got NYX at the top the package manager but you're obviously interested in the Linux distribution they've got some graphical images gnome and KD as well as a um minimal ISO I do not recommend using the minimal ISO at all until you've used nyos for quite a bit I still haven't even used the minimal ISO just because there's really no reason to The Gnome is the one they recommend but if for whatever reason you hate gnome and you want to go plasma they do have that available now when you download these ISO images you are not in necessarily installing nyos with that graphical you know desktop environment included you actually choose what you want installed on your system during the install so you'll choose whether or not you want gnome whether or not you want whatever you'll you'll choose they got plenty of desktops in there by default I highly doubt you'll find the one that you're looking for lacking there you'll you'll have a choice there's also a choice of no desktop environment if you want to go more minimal so there's really no reason to choose the actual minimal ISO we get yourself a beautiful nice live live ISO and install it the same way you would anything else uh let's go over here so once you actually install it this home. n file will not be there that's something I've added um because I use home manager and that home. n file there is a configuration file for home manager which is a method of declaratively setting up your home directory the same way that the configuration NYX file sets up your nyos config so the two files that should actually start with are Hardware configuration and just configuration the hardware configuration file you will most likely never really need to touch if I uh V is an alias I have for um vim and SV is pseudo Vim so I'll go into uh the ETC or Etsy directory I like to call it Etsy but I know some like some people's really get their Jimmy's rustled when I say Etsy who cares uh let's go into your Hardware configuration file and if you go in here you'll see what's actually going on is you're setting up your kernel modules um and like me I have some extra stuff going on in here uh because I use V4 L2 loop back so I can do uh a virtual camera in OBS and them see exactly what you guys are seeing you know when switch here in OBS do all that kind of stuff I have a virtual camera that is loaded up with V4 L2 lopc and so I'm I'm loading the kernel module on this line and I'm telling it hey that that kernel module is provided by this kernel package here so nothing really too fancy going on the file systems it's pretty straightforward I'm setting up a root and a boot that's it uh swap devices don't have any you get it you pretty much really won't ever need to come in here you you really don't need to uh but normally this is generated at boot and I think for most people if we're being honest something similar to what I'm doing here with a V4 L2 loop back is pretty much the only thing that you'll ever have to do if you have to do anything inside of that file ever anyway and then your configuration file here you can see I'm importing my home. ni file so I'm including home manager and then you know I'm setting up hey I'm using system deboot enable that there um setting up my host name network manager time zone and again most of this is actually generated after the install anyway like you don't most of this you don't need to set up anyway uh you might well I don't believe it sets your it gives you a default like host name so you'll probably want to change that and then you set up your user which again most of this will be set up I just added a few extra groups for my user um for me to install like enable hyperland and get pull in all of the dependencies for it uh there's a simple programs. hyperland option and inside of it there's the enable so I'm just enabling it setting it to true that's it that is past my actual configuration files for hyper or for hyperland that's it that will get me a working hyperland that I can configure get set up do all of that then down here in my system packages I'm doing some fancier stuff I'm importing some files that I manage with home manager and importing them uh those scripts in here and they'll be available as system packages system binaries so that's pretty cool that you can do that it's very simple too I'm you know it might look like I'm doing a lot of fancy code here but it's really not I'm I'm importing the file and telling it to inherit from packages because if I was to go oh what am I doing what am I doing oh yeah that's right I forgot I'm inside of the Etsy directory I can't do that uh if I go inside of the Etsy scripts directory and which I'll show you how all the stuff gets created here in a second uh scripts and then let's do like my emo picture you can see in here I've got to change up the scripts a little bit and tell them to pull from packages.to bidden tofi and that is because if I do a where is tofi I'm going to get it's inside of the Nick store and thenb toi so that packages. toofy tells it hey pull from here and then run it so might seem complicated but I swear it's not and then I've got all my other system packages in here to install I'm telling it hey I want to install nerd fonts but I want to override and just pull in the jet brains mono because the nerd packages package is massive so I don't want to pull in the whole thing um then you know I'm enabling setting up steam OPG uh NYX I want it to automatically uh clean up and auto optimize the store also with the garbage collection uh there's you can can set up automatic garbage collection which is really neat and so every time I rebuild my system it's going to go through and delete anything that is older than seven days and yeah pretty nice uh and I believe it will also run it weekly I think so I'm not too sure it might automatically run it weekly on top of that um I can't remember uh off the top of my head it's also super early and I just woke up and tried to record this that's also if my voice is really raspy that's why um so I'm setting a whole bunch of environment variables in here um then I'm setting up suid wrappers and stuff for like G PG um all that kind of stuff and then I'm doing a lot of services so opsh the fs trim timer for you know ssds um I'm setting up the uh X server for xwayland and stuff making sure Li inputs there pipe wire and uh and I'm making sure pulse audio is not enabled I want want pulse audio enabled through pipewire um enabling sound and RT kit um then I'm also telling it hey auto update pull from the stable nixos Channel um and also allow unfree packages and for my custom configuration we could we we'll dive into that in a second but if you just edit this file and you've got your Hardware configuration file and you want to rebuild your system and switch over to the new system with all of those new settings that you just put in there all you have to do is pseudo Nix os- rebuild and you can tap complete switch and this is what you would run and it will rebuild your system quite simply for now for my custom configuration if I go into my zanos folder here in LS though this is the git repo I provide um it will be down in the description um you can go and pull it it's quite a simple uh repo let me remove this no Hub out file it doesn't matter I was messing around with stuff so let me clean this up so you'll see I've got a folder called config files a folder called NYX OS and scripts um all of the extra stuff here is my readme and obviously the picture inside of my readme file and my build script now if I L my config files you'll see I've got a wallpaper my Stinger transition because I want I want those to be pulled with the system for OBS um and for my system wallpaper everywhere the Stinger transition is how I get the nice you know effect in OBS when I change scenes uh I've got a font in here that I like to use in for my thumbnails all the time and then you know some configuration files and like my emoji file that I need for you know um well to be able to source for uh for this right here I don't know why I made it like non full screen I can easily do it there I just hit the wrong key but I don't know anyway uh so I can take all of these config files and put them where they need to go with this script right here and this script I run this instead of that rebuild command and it will put my configuration files from this repo where they should go and then rebuild the system so for me anytime I want to rebuild my system I come into this git repo I make all of my changes and mess around in here and then I run this script and it removes the configuration file in my Etsy directory my home file in my uh configuration directory it removes config files and scripts folders in the Etsy directory you know assuming they exist and then uh then we copy over the new configuration file the new home file then we copy over config files and scripts where they need to go and we rebuild the system so pretty much what you were doing before but all managed uh like all the copying and deleting and all that good stuff is managed inside of that script so me managing my system making changes to my configuration and also sharing it with people is much easier here and also guaranteeing that when you replicate my system you're going to have all the same fonts uh there there's not going to be any weird screw screwing around with system settings or you don't have a certain font that I have or blah blah blah no matter what you're fine and I think that's really nice with nixo it is extremely nice and I've had a lot of fun playing around with a system and all that you can do with it it it's very very fun I don't recommend NX OS for everyone I don't think this is a system for just anyone it's much more of a tinker Playhouse then you might think when you're first getting started like I think the the good part of nixos is if you enjoy tinkering around with your system fine-tuning stuff and especially sharing it with people then nyos is going to be awesome for you if you just want a stable system that you don't have to touch and you can always clone and rebuild never have a problem somewhere else NX OS is also a really good choice but the setup part is probably going to turn you away because you're not used to declaring stuff stuff the same like just managing your system is so different than what you're used to on other Linux dros that it's a very good chance it could turn you off but if you're able to get through that initial setup and get your system that you have wherever else set up on nixos I mean you'll really not have to do it again so yeah like all you might have to do is go in and change the update Channel to the new stable release if you want to do that to unstable if you want to like your your system will just keep working and if it doesn't keep working and you need to like let's say your RAM goes bad you're blah blah blah whatever you got to build a new pc you're switching over stuff you want to completely start from scratch and rebuild the system the way it was the first time you installed it you only need to keep around a few config files um that's it and even if you're doing something much more like me I mean I have reduced down the overall scope of the files that I've got for my system configuration quite a bit and I really enjoy it it I just I have really enjoyed my time with NYX OS and I'm very much looking forward to what I'm going to do with it past this I one of the things I'm really looking forward to doing uh is messing around and doing some stuff with game development I am definitely going to be doing some game development stuff so if that interests you please definitely let me know stick around I'll throw up the guys supporting me over on patreon again because these guys are supporting the channel and you know if there's anything close to sponsors it's these boys so thanks everybody for helping out just supporting and also having such great conversations with me on pretty much everywhere uh here on YouTube over in Discord so many people have been talking with me about NX OS talking with me about you know just in general their Lins life lately and it's been a really nice time to dive into what everybody's checking out and sharing experiences and stuff so if you're not on the Discord definitely come join we have great conversations over there and thank you for watching I'll see you in the next one [Music] peace