2026-07-09 01:20 UTC
@mischievoustomato@tsundere.love @ceooffuggy@shitpost.cloud yeah. Honestly, I went with home-manager because of my "my repo is 100% nix" obsession, but the more I used it, the more I realized it just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity that makes things harder to visualize and requires home-manager to provide modules to the shit you are using.
For instance, I updated Niri to have access to some advanced blur features it got. But I wasn't being able to configure these features declaratively because home-manager didn't expose the needed modules, I had to add another flake from a guy who made a fork and added those modules.
It seems that options like nix-maid (https://github.com/viperML/nix-maid), hjem (https://github.com/feel-co/hjem) or even stow (https://medium.com/quick-programming/how-i-use-gnu-stow-to-organize-my-dotfiles-in-git-d3281147e1c8) are simpler options that don't add another layer, you just manage the dotfiles directly.
Replies (1)
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@mischievoustomato@tsundere.love 2026-07-09 02:03
@Suzu@detroitriotcity.com @ceooffuggy@shitpost.cloud i myself had a "MUST NIXIFY EVERYTHING", but quickly found it was annoying. too many things expect to be written at runtime or were too complex to manually configure with nix. So, things that were like that, I simply symlinked using home-manager, ha. Still, I really like NixOS, I keep coming back to it, but I think that if Gentoo were to have more developers, I'd be on it. But well, NixOS just has a lot of packages, even if dealing with them properly is annoying.