documentation is out of date

[maninalift]

This, honestly is partly a personal request for help in how to get started, but also a suggestion that others are likely experiencing the same difficulty and pointers in the documentation to sources of information could be very useful.

I'm not that confident with nix although I have used it here and there as needed for years. I currently have one machine running nixos which I want to transition to reasonable flake-based configuration, before making that a multi-system configuration and rolling out nixos to several machines.

• I read through the documentation at https://devos.divnix.com and was left not feeling that I fully understood how things fitted together
• I followed the "from NixOS" section of the above. The syntax given for adding the host to the flake file seems not to work but more importantly, it doesn't tell me how to customise my system (say, add cups), add a user and customise the user (say, add some a text editor for the user)
• I tried going through a bunch of the forks of devos to see how people had customised their configs. Unfortunately users differ either in the version of devos that they are using or how they have customised things enough that I found it hard to pull-together an understanding of the configuration process that way.
• Several places link to https://github.com/divnix/devos/tree/nrd/ as an example but this doesn't exist. Some canonical, up-to-date reference of a personalised config would be great
• a video of creating a basic personalised system config from scratch would be a great way to give an overview of the process that complements the more detail-oriented documentation that already exists.

Part of the problem is most likely that devos is developing and it is hard to document a moving target.

I hope this experience report is useful. This is the sort of thing that leaves me feeling very dumb, after putting another hour into trying to get a devos-based config working and feeling that I haven't really made any progress.

[nrdxp]

@blaggacao maybe you and I, and perhaps @Pacman99 if he has any time can setup a when2meet to try and come together and address the aging docs? My original goal was to have in code docs similar to Rust to make things a bit easier to manage. Perhaps we could now try this with nix-doc?

This seems to be becoming a bigger and bigger problem, and only a few of us are familiar enough with the code to address it properly.

[maninalift]

When I get back to it, I'm going to try a more conservative approach. Instead of trying to move almost all of my config across at once, I'm going to create a host then a two or three simple profiles then a home and a system suite, then a user.

I can try to document that into a simple tutorial and share it with you but I can't promise anything as my life is crazy busy ATM.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

[jackmac92]

just wanted to second the request for a bit more help getting started. I can install nixos using the official guide, but haven't been able to get devos install working

(I think the issue is that I'm not including the nixos-generate-config hardware-configuration.nix correctly, so it fails to find the filesystem after reboot)