You learn to run by running.

This project contains config files so that they're backuped and can be shared across multiple devices. It's made shareable by heavily relying on nix. Per machine I maintain a seperate branch. Feel free to contact me on discord or twitter if you have issues/questions when using any of these configs for your own.

Usage

clone into /linux-config

Doing it into root is intentional, we want absoulte paths to make everything easier. Make sure your user owns that directory:

chown jappie:users -R /linux-config

Now run the script to install all dotfiles.

cd /linux-config/scripts
./nixos-setup.sh

Yes on installing configuration.nix. it'll make a backup of the existing one, but the default one can be generated anyway

run nixos-rebuild switch

For release and dependency updates, follow the upgrade guide. It covers pin updates, overlay compatibility, machine evaluation, actual package builds, daemon diagnostics, activation, and rollback.

NixOS 26.05 upgrade

The main nixpkgs pin tracks nixos-26.05, with Home Manager on release-26.05. This supplies Foot 1.27.0, including the fix for Foot #2335: OpenCode's OSC 99 notification-capability query could abort older Foot versions with xsnprintf.c:42: xvsnprintf: No buffer space available.

From the /linux-config checkout, build and activate using the pinned nixpkgs:

bash scripts/rebuild.sh build
bash scripts/rebuild.sh switch

Open a fresh Foot process afterward and verify foot --version reports at least 1.27.0. NixOS and Home Manager stateVersion values describe existing installation defaults and are intentionally retained during release upgrades.

NixOS 26.05 removes programs.adb and the unmaintained light package. android-tools now supplies adb with systemd-managed device access, and brightnessctl supplies brightness control, including the i3 brightness keys.

Check Emacs compatibility after changing nixpkgs or the Emacs overlay:

nix-build nix/ci.nix

This builds the configured PGTK editor, including its packages, and runs the headless ERT suite using the same overlay's no-X Emacs release. Building only emacs-tests does not check the PGTK build. The overlay must remain compatible with the pinned nixpkgs Tree-sitter API.

Key managment

1. Setup syncthing. Syncthing contains my main password manager file from keepassxc. Since syncthing is decentralized and encrypted in transport, I consider this the safest way of moving this accross systems.

2. Setup a password for main user

passwd $MAIN_USER

2. generate a new gpg key, this should be password protected with the same password from previous step.

gpg --full-generate-key

3. Then find the keygrip of the newly generated key and write it into .pam-gnupg

gpg -K --with-keygrip

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-22.11/nixos/modules/security/pam.nix#L413

Alternatives

I'm aware of home manager.

Seems a bit overkill to me. I run this on two to three machines, I understand what happens by simply making symlinks to config files of which the source is tracked in git, no need to also nixify that.

Keys

we need to generate a new gpg key:

gpg --full-generate-key

use 4096 rsa&rsa expiry one year, expiry doesn't matter, just some gpg flag.

now go https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys for example, generate a new secret, and save it as openapi.gpg in ~/keys