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mylinuxforwork / dotfiles

The ML4W Dotfiles for Hyprland - An advanced and full-featured configuration for the dynamic tiling window manager Hyprland including an easy to use installation script for Arch based Linux distributions.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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[FEATURE] Automatic ML4W Dotfiles installation script #8

Closed mylinuxforwork closed 1 month ago

mylinuxforwork commented 1 month ago

Would be great if the ML4W Dotfiles could be installed completely (with only few manual confirmation) through the installation script.

99linesofcode commented 1 month ago

Perhaps slightly off topic but on Gitlab I mentioned potentially moving to a Nix home-manager backed solution to make things cross platform among other benefits (declarative syntax, rollbacks, nix shell for easy development/testing etc.). What are your thoughts on that?

mylinuxforwork commented 1 month ago

Thanks for your feedback. But I am not sure if I understand your request. Can you share more details how it should work from a user perspective? Thank you.

99linesofcode commented 1 month ago

So, NixOS is a Linux distro with its own package manager Nix. It's different from other package managers in that it is a functional programming language and framework for declaratively describing and configuring your whole OS. Then there is the concept of nix shell and nix develop to quickly spin up a virtual environment in which to test packages or temporarily load a development environment which I won't go into right now.

In addition to the package manager itself there is home-manager. This is specifically intended for managing user configuration (dotfiles) separately.

Key reasons why I would recommend building ML4W on top or around of it are:

  1. It already has a framework in place for many things you are doing here and will require much less setup/maintenance when adding or removing packages;
  2. Loading new changes is a matter of running home-manager switch and you can always go back to a previous generation if something broke;
  3. It's declarative so very easy to read once you got the syntax down and 100% reproducible;
  4. It allows for easy customization without a hand rolled solution like the one we discussed/explored earlier on Gitlab.

Updating the system themes and such on the fly might require a different approach and naturally you will be using a separate package manager for everything added by ML4W so there are definitely some trade offs to be considered.

I'm still getting my feet wet myself but am working on a MVP based on some examples I've found online. Will gladly share that with you and walk you through it if you are interested.

Edit: spelling

mylinuxforwork commented 1 month ago

Thanks for your detailed explanations. I know the fundamentals of Nix but not all the details. The home manager concept sounds interesting.

I will add a installation config file to the installer to automate the complete installation/update process.

Looking forward to the results of your experiments. Please share it then.

mylinuxforwork commented 1 month ago

@99linesofcode The automation of the installation/update is now available on the rolling release. Feel free to test it: https://github.com/mylinuxforwork/dotfiles/wiki/Automation-of-the-installation-and-update