Quick installation of Lix + Homemanager

lix_install

Lix is a community-driven fork of the Nix package manager that offers several technical,  
and organizational improvements over upstream Nix while maintaining full backward compatibility.

It has has implemented various optimizations that reduce build times, 
increase the parsing performance and error messages compared to upstream Nix, 
enhances the debugging workflow, and uses Meson as its build system instead of plain Make.

Also, it incrementally introduces Rust to the codebase, and stays fully backwards compatible. 🙂

ATTENTION: Uninstall Nix if you have it already installed.

Installing Lix:

curl -sSf -L https://install.lix.systems/lix | sh -s -- install

Say no to Flakes, and start a new shell or terminal. Then run these commands:

nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable nixpkgs
nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager

nix-channel --update
nix-shell '<home-manager>' -A install

Now, open the configuration file:

code /$HOME/.config/home-manager/home.nix

(Replace code with your preferred text editor)

Find the package you want to install: https://search.nixos.org/packages

See line 18 and below: This is where you insert the names of the applications you want to install.

Be sure to put the name of the application within the brackets, like so:

  home.packages = with pkgs; [
      dotnet-sdk
      blender
      and-so-on
  ];

  programs.home-manager.enable = true;
}

Save the file and then run home-manager switch to complete the process.
To update the packages, run nix-channel --update && home-manager switch

Further documentation: https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/nixos-with-flakes/start-using-home-manager

GPU-driven apps that make use of Vulkan (or OpenGL) for hardware accelerated computation, do need additional configuration:

https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.xhtml#sec-usage-gpu-non-nixos

It is possible to configure and maintain dotfiles with this setup, and also to create a self-contained development container.

You can also find help in the Nix and Lix community channels:

Discord https://discord.gg/JTfyc6q8kB
Matrix https://matrix.to/#/#space:lix.systems
Zulip https://zulip.lix.systems/

Also see the official Nix, and home-manager documentation.

Lix is a drop in replacement, and all the normal nix commands will work. 🙂