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.
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.
The current crystal binary in nixpkgs complains about not finding pcre
when you try to compile anything with it, so crystal-flake is necessary
to have a working crystal environment under NixOS.
crystal-flake additionally packages crystalline, which is nice since no
one has been able to successfully create a pull request for nixpkgs yet.
Reference: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/129002
Since all of these files do roughly the same thing (that is, configure
the system in a specific way that a separate file seems necessary), this
should reduce the overall complexity of the project tree.
This is my attempt at putting all modules in one directory to avoid
having to remember whether a module was a part of applications/,
desktop/, or terminal/.
