I am pretty happy with my configs now, with home manager but no flakes so far. I am, however, annoyed by all the dotfiles that I didn’t define, and I’m worried how many other files are laying around without getting imperatively defined.
I’m sort of picturing a kiosk mode, where every time I reboot everything is wiped and I only have what I defined. Any files I want to keep are on other partitions or network locations mapped in my config. If a new config file is created by changing a setting in an application, I want to be notified so I can add it to my Nix configs.
Is this possible? Is it a terrible idea?
The biggest challenge I see is in installing games, because it looks like they often leave bits all over the place.
Impermanence is basically what you’re looking for. Complete wipe, only recreating the files you have defined or excluded.
Personally, i’ve not yet gone down this path, for the exact reasons you’ve mentioned. Its a matter of time, until i forget to allowlist a path for something new, or a game
THAT’S the word I was looking for!
Thank you.
Now I can hit the wiki. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence
I did more or less your idea with kiosk mode. Everything which is not explicitly defined by nix is on tmpfs in my setup. But I don’t play games on this machine, so I can’t say anything to this.
I’ve got the idea from “erase your darlings”: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/
The same thing with btrfs: https://hanckmann.com/posts/20230104-nixos-and-erasing-my-darlings/
The whole idea is about impermanence: https://github.com/nix-community/impermanence
This is fabulous - exactly what I was hoping for!
I feel like I want a easy to either detect live, or diff before shutdown, changes and file creation that I might want to add to my impermanent configs.
If you go with the btrfs option, you could change the wipe script to copy all files to a specific location and manually inspect that after reboot.