[Nix-dev] NixOS on a machine with only one user

[Ertugrul Söylemez]

> 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
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