Alright, time for me to quit thinking about this and actually do it now. Having said that, I want any and all reasonable advice from anyone who's done anything like this before, so by all means—especially if you've tried doing something like this and went wrong at some point, because I would really like to know what not to do.

I'm about to set up an external ssd—one of those orange LaCie drives that's borderline indestructible and also connects over USB C, so also pretty fast, for USB at least—for my home directory as well as some other things related to that.

Already on NixOS, so Home Manager is already there, so continue using it, obviously. Also planning on making a new user that is separate from my current one, and also keeping the current one as-is, just it case; new one will use systemd-homed unless I happen to run into some reason why that's doesn't work, which I doubt, but I should also assume that's a non-zero chance until after I've already done all of this; assuming that works, which it should AFAIK, I want LUKs encryption, and out of the three available options (for systemd-homed, which are ext4, btrfs, and XFS), I want either btrfs or XFS if only to try something new (haven't used either of them before, already using ext4), and I'll consider any reasonable argument one way or the other in terms of which is better and why. Current idea is that splitting the drive into two partitions and symlinking between them is probably the best move; I suspect I'll find out soon enough. I also want Git and nothing else, as opposed to whatever fancy dotfiles manager; I'll make the few symlinks I'll actually need myself.

Thoughts?

#NixOS #Systemd #Git #HomeDirectory #Dotfiles