NixOS is the latest and greatest in terms of system configuration management. Think of how configuration management tools like Ansible or Packer.io allow you to define the run-time configuration of you machine in a state-ful way. Combine that with the power of what is the Nix package manager, and you have a Linux distribution that follows this model for configuring the entire system.

My Nixos/Enlightenment desktop.

NixOS Experience

I decided to test drive NixOS and see what I thought. The idea of defining an entire system configuration from install in a single place sounded like something I wanted to see for myself. Ideally, it would take much of the difficult setup of things I typically maintain separately like my dotfiles. These could ideally be managed across systems as a single Nix configuration.

NixOS uses the concept of packages which are laid down over the filesystem. These packages are stored in the Nix repository under /nix/, and are symlinked over their expected locations on the filesystem. Whenever Nix sets up your system, it reads through its master configuration file and grabs the nixpkgs it needs and lays them down in its automated way.

My first install of NixOS was done from a USB drive to my Dell XPS13 machine. This part was fairly easy using dd. The troublesome part was getting the B43 wl kernel module to properly detect my wireless device. I don’t have access to a wired ethernet connection, so the only way I am able to install packages from the Nix repositories was to get wifi working. Out of the box, it didn’t so I was only able to install a fixed set of packages available on the ISO. After some trial-and-error I found that someone kindly pre-built an older ISO of NixOS containing the required B43 drivers that would work with my system.

With wifi finally working, it was time to install some packages and come up with my base install. Everything that I need to set-up can be done in the /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. This file contains a desired state for which to use the next time I rebuild Nixos. Using the basic configuration template that was installed from the ISO, I was able to modify it to my liking.

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  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    wget
    pciutils
    acpid
    xdotool
    binutils-unwrapped
    vim
    emacs
    iw
    firefox
    lsof
    git
    iosevka
    unzip
    zsh
    i3lock
    libinput-gestures
    enlightenment.terminology
    scrot
  ];

Beginning with this vector of packages, I am able to list which packages I would like installed with my system. Pretty self-explanatory.

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fonts.fonts = with pkgs; [
  iosevka
];

Moving to fonts, I am an Iosevka user, so installing this is also self-explanatory.

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  services.redshift = {
    enable = true;
  };

  location.latitude = 30.26;
  location.longitude =  -97.74;

  # Enable the X11 windowing system.
  services.xserver.enable = true;

  # Enable the Enlightenment Desktop Environment.
  services.xserver.desktopManager.enlightenment.enable = true;

For the Enlightenment-related settings, it is simple as toggling a few options. I decided to use E24 with X11 because Wayland support isn’t stable. Redshift is what I’ve been using for screen tempurature adjustment. Typically it is a pain to get set up as a daemon, and in this scenerio, I give it the coordinates, and enable and it’s finished!

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# Define a user account. Don't forget to set a password with ‘passwd’.
  users.extraUsers.mbagnara = {
    isNormalUser = true;
    uid = 1000;
    shell = pkgs.zsh;
    home = "/home/mbagnara";
    extraGroups = [
      "wheel"
      "input"
      "bluetooth"
    ];
  };

Lastly, I set up my user-acount using the Z-Shell declaratively.

Conclusion

NixOS isn’t without its faults. With ease of configuration, will eventually come problems in other areas. Specifically I experienced issues upgrading, and issues debugging applications such as Enlightenment. Because I was installing from an ISO that was based on Nixos 17, this older version had problems when I tried to update. I managed to break my system numerous times trying to work through compatibility problems related to a breaking change in the Nix package. This change broke the schema for the Nix configuration file, and made it difficult to perform an update to a newer version.

A solution I managed to get running was to update the Nix package, and side-load it using the nix-env command. It allows packages to be assumed outside of the current runtime system and it allowed me to update the rest of my packages and get my system up to the latest stable NixOS release.

Although I didn’t get to merge everything from my previous system & dotfiles, I have a good starting place with NixOS. I have a declarative system that I can easily tear down and even provision as a VM while keeping my favorite settings. My dotfiles are still a separate repo, but I am looking at something like Home manager as a drop-in replacement using its own wrappers. All in all, give Nix a go and see for yourself!

Enlightenment

Enlightenment, or E for short, is a unique piece of software. It is one of the earliest desktop environments for the Linux desktop. It has gone through various iterations, and even experienced a fork at version 16. It has a very colorful history and helped to shape what desktops could do, using its compositing window manager. There are many outrageous screenshots of highly customized desktops that may have been more over-the-top in visuals than usability! However, this demonstration carried Enlightenment into its relatively niche yet passionate space it finds itself in today.

Don’t worry, I am installing E24, released in early June 2020. Enlightenment can be described as a full feature environment with many bells and whistles while being visually appealing. However, it doesn’t carry the burden of dependencies and heavy memory usage.

Now I have been using I3 as a tiling window manager on Arch Linux for some time and I grew accustomed to keyboard-driven navigation. One of the important features that brought me to try E was its new tiling module. It provides most of the tiling functionality someone would expect from I3, or Yabai.

Setup

As mentioned above, Enlightenment is simple to include in the NixOS configuration because it is already a member of nixpkgs. On bootup, I was presented with an Enlightenment setup screen on my first login. I was asked to set up languages, keyboards, and even given the choice between tiling and standard mode. I filled in this information and was set-up with a new Enlightenment desktop.

If there is any desktop environment you would like to configure and tweak, it would be enlightenment. While most DEs are fully customizable with configuration, E takes this a step further and provides a rich set of customizations and options to configure it to your preference.

And you will want to configure Enlightenment from its default. There are small nuances of the desktop experience I didn’t want to give up, and many nice tweaks to improve workflow. For example, I set up a series of keyboard shortcuts to switch desktops, and to move focused applications to various desktops like in I3.

Enlightenment theme icons took some work to get working. Using XDG icon themes on enlightenment will follow the specification by searching XDG_DATA_DIRS for location of icon themes. Because NixOS handles this directory differently, it lays down symlinks to the icon package and appends those to the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable. NixOS also forces mtime of all its packages to 0, at the time of writing, breaks how E indexes the icon database. I reached out to IRC, and was generously helped by one of the E devs Carsten Haitzler with a patch!

Conclusion

Enlightenment is nice. It took some time to customize and work through some issues. I like its relative obscurity and the community isn’t tossed to and fro from the waves of the sea, like Gnome. Things that I found joy setting up like ACPI shortcuts for screen brightness and battery notifications were brittle custom scripts, and these seem to just work with E. Although wifi was tricky setting up because of b43 drivers, I was able to make use of the up and coming IWD with Enlightenment’s connman wifi selector. It is easy and just works. Not all applications support EFL, Enlightenments toolkit. This means apps like Firefox don’t maintain the exact styling as native enlightenment, including cursors. I wish this was more seamless. But overall, E is great, has a great community.