The previous commit didn't actually work, and I shouldn't need to
change the variables often, so it's much simpler to not have them.
In the event that I do need to change something, rg and sd should get
the job done well.
Now that I have figured out how to get all the Windows applications I
previously used working under Wine (including those that didn't work in
the virtual machine after trying to manually install dependencies) there
is no reason for me to use vmware.
Using NixOS for Windows applications allows them to be used with
systemd-nspawn containers, thus achieving things like isolation, private
networks, impermanence, and more. All of this without having to maintain
a separate operating system install.
Now I don't have to wait for anything to be included in nixos-unstable
and can simply merge whatever I want whenever I want. This also has the
advantage of not having to specify which input is needed to get a
package from.
Now that I am able to understand and read NixOS/nixpkgs source code, I
understand that the usage of the npm module isn't needed since I don't
configure npm at a global level.
This is a working example of using the modules in our existing
configuration to start a network of virtual machines with
nixos-build-vms. Note that VMs take longer to start up in this case than
nixos-rebuild build-vm, and that said VMs may lack certain functionality
(such as dynamic resolution in GNOME) that would otherwise be present
with build-vm.
Although networks are certainly cute (and I'm glad that I feel familiar
with them thanks to my better understanding of Nix), they do seem less
convenient than nixos-rebuild build-vm and don't appear to support Nix
flakes. Networks therefore seem more useful for running multiple one-off
services that couldn't otherwise be ran in a container.
This results in a consistent environment when using any given shell.
Note that adding a package to $PATH instead of just referencing it where
it's needed is useful since otherwise the man pages are inaccessible.
This fixes some neovim plugins throwing errors due to missing things
such as language servers.
Note that although it *would* be possible to abstract this functionality
into a variety of imports, options, or other abstractions, including
everything at once should reduce complexity since I am not interested in
maintaining different states of configuration. In other words, either
everything works, or something doesn't work and then everything works.
Note that this container uses home-manager from the Nix flake on the
host system, which is pretty cool.
Currently modules in this repository *don't* differentiate between
home-manager and nixos, but this could be changed in the future to
support e.g. my home-manager neovim config on a non-nixos system.
