I use Nix, so I’ll just reinstall my system if anything really bad ever happens. Sometimes I reinstall just because. My important files are on a delegate drive I have to manually mount, so I’m not too worried.
Take the next step, and write a simple ansible playbook to configure your installed applications and services. It looks a little complicated at first but it’s pretty easy.
Then you just keep your playbook with your other files. When you decide to reinstall, you just install ansible then run it on your playbook. It’ll install and set up everything you add to your OS.
NixOS really is the next step from an ansible setup like yours imo. It can and usually is a fully declarative and immutable system outside of your nix config and whatever personal files you have.
Yeah, I get that. I’m not about to trust NixOS for my production machines at work and since I already know Ansible it’s just as easy for me to manage my home machines the same way.
Of course it’s all personal preference, but I’ve been managing my dot files from the very beginning with nix(home manager). Never tried ansible, but, just like you, don’t really need to, as everything is already set up well in Nix(including all my configs for all my programs).
One of the things I learned several years ago was how to set up my HD so that the system and home folder are on different partitions. It isn’t terribly hard to do, and every OS installer I’ve used gives you the option. It’s served me very well.
I don’t have a need for that atm(like I said, my laptop has a separate drive), but will look into that in case I ever need it in the future. My problem with this personally tho is that I share my drive between Windows and Linux, and Linux doesn’t exactly play well with NTFS. Sounds really cool however for having a multi boot Linux system, with all your files shared between distros.
I use Nix, so I’ll just reinstall my system if anything really bad ever happens. Sometimes I reinstall just because. My important files are on a delegate drive I have to manually mount, so I’m not too worried.
Take the next step, and write a simple ansible playbook to configure your installed applications and services. It looks a little complicated at first but it’s pretty easy.
Then you just keep your playbook with your other files. When you decide to reinstall, you just install
ansiblethen run it on your playbook. It’ll install and set up everything you add to your OS.NixOS really is the next step from an ansible setup like yours imo. It can and usually is a fully declarative and immutable system outside of your nix config and whatever personal files you have.
Yeah, I get that. I’m not about to trust NixOS for my production machines at work and since I already know Ansible it’s just as easy for me to manage my home machines the same way.
Of course it’s all personal preference, but I’ve been managing my dot files from the very beginning with nix(home manager). Never tried ansible, but, just like you, don’t really need to, as everything is already set up well in Nix(including all my configs for all my programs).
One of the things I learned several years ago was how to set up my HD so that the system and home folder are on different partitions. It isn’t terribly hard to do, and every OS installer I’ve used gives you the option. It’s served me very well.
What’s the purpose of having system and home folder on different positions?
You can easily install a new system if your system gets borked or you just want a new distro, and you won’t lose your files.
I don’t have a need for that atm(like I said, my laptop has a separate drive), but will look into that in case I ever need it in the future. My problem with this personally tho is that I share my drive between Windows and Linux, and Linux doesn’t exactly play well with NTFS. Sounds really cool however for having a multi boot Linux system, with all your files shared between distros.