Every month I try #NixOS again and again, but I don't really move forward. For basic tasks, it seems there exists no simple solution, like:

1. What is the pendant to "apt-cache search <somepackage>" that is FAST?

2. What is the pendant to "apt-cache policy <somepackage>"? I want to know if this package is installed or not, what version is installed and is maybe a newer version available?

3. How to check which packages are upgraded & the version of these packages?

I do love when I fall into rabbit holes, kind of, but today's excursion got unhealthy. As in I barely did any of the things I was supposed to do, or meant to do.

FWIW, I got a fully reproducible (as in byte-reproducible) #NixOS #QubesOS 4.3 template working. Well, working is a bit of an overstatement but I got as far as this.

Most of the work was done by evq here https://github.com/evq/qubes-nixos-template I just banged my head against the wall until my ancient memories of Qubes OS internals bubbled up, and got interested in how reproducible ext4 images could work. Anyway. I'll assemble an in-depth PR some other time (tomorrow is travel day), but I've wanted this since 2022.

There, that's one type of neurospicy that I am 🤦

Trying out the Cinnamon desktop with NixOS and I'm pleasantly surprised by how good it is! It's mainly x11 right now, but I can live with that.

One hiccup though, the online accounts tool wouldn't work until I added

services.gnome.gnome-online-accounts.enable = true;

The official wiki didn't have any notes about needing to do that, so I added them. Now I'm wondering how much of my config could be extrapolated into fixing the docs for the tools I use.

https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Cinnamon

#NixOS #nix #wiki #documentation #CinnamonDesktop