- Published on
Practical NixOS: the Book
- Authors
- Name
- Drake Rossman
- @drakerossman
Practical NixOS
I am in the making of a book about NixOS. The key thing I want for this book is to make it approachable by the wider audience. At best, the book would be easily understood by a person who had never had any experience with Linux whatsoever.
There is quite a lot written about nix and NixOS already in the form of documentation and blog posts, but there are actually no books - at all! I think the advantage of having a book is that you can keep up with the complexity being thrown at you in a linear fashion, instead of having to dive into countless rabbit holes without a known roadmap.
There are several topics which I have already drafted and they are going to make it into the book:
- "Advanced basics" of the Nix expression language (there is still no good introduction out there, after all these years!)
- Hitchhiker's guide to nix ecosystem
- Installing NixOS
- Using Flakes
- Having ecnrypted root volumes
- Adding homemanager and using it for VSCode configuration
- Using NixOS for development environments
- Different development strategies: Rust, TypeScript & Node, Python
- Community-developed tools and utilities for NixOS which would make your life simpler
- Installing pre-compiled binaries as parts of NixOS configuration
- Rocking Wayland as daily driver
- Containerizing apps the NixOS way
This list is not complete, but it gives your the rough understand of what to expect.
There are also posts on my blog, which are serving as a kind of preview for the book:
- NixOS for Apt/Yum Users: a Gift That Keeps on Giving
- How to Convert Default NixOS to NixOS with Flakes
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