> NixOS noob here. I'm using NixOS on a machine with only one user (me). > What's the best strategy for installing packages? > [...] > Installing into a normal user profile
In general I tend to just assume that my system is an actual multi-user system. I'm a normal user, so I don't make any assumptions on the way imaginary fellow users use their account. A very small number of packages will have to be used by the majority of the users on the system, for example because they are relevant to the network topology or purpose. Most of them will be installed in the form of NixOS services. All other packages are user-specific. Installing user packages into the user profile has the additional advantage that it is safe and secure to install your own packages, which you may want to do from time to time, perhaps because you may want to use Nixpkgs-master for some bleeding edge version or because you may want to use Nix for a custom package or development. Remember that Nix handles not only code. You can equally well write and deploy a bunch of static files using it. Assuming bigger things usually gives you a better or at least more scalable result, and in most cases the additional cost is very close to zero. For example every single-disk system I set up uses a two-disk RAID array with one missing disk from the point of view of mdadm. If it does happen that I actually want to add more disks, it will be a few short online commands to do it instead of a tedious reinstallation of the entire system, and it costs only a few megabytes. The additional disk might as well be an external emergency disk that starts synchronising as soon as I plug it in. Fortunately this is possible with NixOS. Many distributions, including all Anaconda-based ones (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, etc.), do not allow you to do this. Greets, Ertugrul
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev