NixOS!

I wrote about swapping to Linux a while ago, but I’ve been using NixOS on-and-off for a bit since then. After my confs, I’ve taken to sitting down and configuring my setup far more seriously.

I installed Zed a while ago, but didn’t do much with it. I’ve set it up further now, and hooked it up with GH Copilot and trying the agent stuff I keep seeing everywhere. It’s pretty good actually! I’ve been mostly using Sonnet 4, though I’m trying a bit of GPT-5 and good ‘ol 2.5 Pro. It’s doing a decent job so far. I’m not NixOS expert, but I can usually read what the LLM suggests and compare it with what people in forums and such suggest, and it seems to be ok so far. It doesn’t use the most up-to-date tooling sometimes, which is expected, but its allowing me to make some changes to my system that I’ve been meaning to do but was too lazy to type out (the main use case for LLMs I’d argue).

On some things though, I’ve been letting it loose and just blindly accepting the results (vibe coding). Since its NixOS I’m not worried about breaking my system config. I just used this to build caps-log and vectro, two packages which aren’t in nixpkgs. I’m sure I’m not building them in the best possible way, but I’m just as sure that it would have taken me far more time to figure it out myself (though I still intend to do so since I want to get better at Nix), and that this way is good enough. I’m still skeptical (as a user of LLMs) of building proper software using LLMs, but they’re great at writing code.

I forgot how good NixOS feels—a declarative setup is sooo nice. Linux is also really nice on a whole; there are far more cool tools I want to use. Zed is also really neat. I probably need to tune it a bit more but it feels pretty good. Not tenable for R though; I need to finish my flake with my Positron setup for any real R work. I might make that public in some gist or a repo of templates, but there are also probably many better templates out there.