Installing NixOS

Update

Please see my followup post with NixOS for a far better experience with it

Today I decided to install NixOS as a recommendation, a purely functional Linux distribution, since Xubuntu kept crashing. Here's my journey, and how I managed to install it from a terminal for the first time in my life. Steps aren't hard, but they may not seem obvious at first.

• Grab the Live CD, burn it on a USB stick and boot. I recommend using Etcher.

• Type systemctl start display-manager and wait.¹

• Open both the manual and the konsole.

• Connect to the network using the GUI.

• Create the disk partitions by using fdisk.

  You can list them with fdisk -l, modify a certain drive with fdisk /dev/sdX (for instance, /dev/sda) and follow the instructions.

  To create the file system, use mkfs.ext4 -L <label> /dev/sdXY and swap with mkswap -L <label> /dev/sdXY.

  The EFI partition should be done with mkfs.vfat.

• Mount the target to /mnt e.g. if the label was nixos, mount /dev/disk/by-label/nixos /mnt

• mkdir /mnt/boot and then mount your EFI partition to it.

• Generate a configuration template with nixos-generate-config --root /mnt, and modify it with nano /etc/nixos/configuration.nix.

• While modifying the configuration, make sure to add boot.loader.grub.device = "/dev/sda"

• More useful configuration things are:

  • Uncomment the whole i18n block.
  • Add some essential packages like environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [wget git firefox pulseaudio networkmanagerapplet];.
  • If you want to use XFCE, add services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.enable = true;, otherwise, you don't need networkmanagerapplet either. Make sure to add networking.networkmanager.enable = true; too.
  • Define some user for yourself (modify guest name) and use a UID greater than 1000. Also, add yourself to extraGroups = ["wheel" "networkmanager"]; (the first to be able to sudo, the second to use network related things).

• Run nixos-install. If you ever modify that file again, to add more packages for instance (this is how they're installed), run nixos-rebuild switch (or use test to test but don't boot to it, or boot not to switch but to use on next boot.

• reboot.

• Login as root, and set a password for your user with passwd <user>. Done!

I enjoyed the process of installing it, and it's really cool that it has versioning and is so clean to keep track of which packages you install. But not being able to run arbitrary binaries by default is something very limitting in my opinion, though they've done a good job.

I'm now back to Xubuntu, with a fresh install.

Update

It is not true that "they don't allow running arbitrary binaries by default", as pointed out in their manual, buildFHSUserEnv:

buildFHSUserEnv provides a way to build and run FHS-compatible lightweight sandboxes. It creates an isolated root with bound /nix/store, so its footprint in terms of disk space needed is quite small. This allows one to run software which is hard or unfeasible to patch for NixOS -- 3rd-party source trees with FHS assumptions, games distributed as tarballs, software with integrity checking and/or external self-updated binaries. It uses Linux namespaces feature to create temporary lightweight environments which are destroyed after all child processes exit, without root user rights requirement.

Thanks to @bb010g for pointing this out.

Notes