NixOS & Linux

Depth: shipping — on my own machine, every day. My laptop runs NixOS with Hyprland, defined as a flake I can rebuild from scratch. When something breaks, it breaks in a file I can read.

The whole thing is public: github.com/abdurahmon27/haywan-nix .

What that actually buys me

• The machine is reproducible. A new laptop is a nixos-rebuild, not a weekend.
• Rollbacks are real. A bad change is one generation back.
• Per-project shells: shell.nix per repo, no global tool soup. (This portfolio has one.)

haywan-nix — the config, as a thing other people can use

Publishing a dotfiles repo is easy; publishing one somebody else can boot is not. Four decisions did most of that work:

• One folder per machine. Everything in hosts/<name>/ becomes nixosConfigurations.<name> automatically, so adding a machine is adding a directory — no editing a central list that grows into a mess.
• Two files to edit. default.nix for the system (drivers, services), home.nix for apps and dotfiles. Everything else is module internals the user never has to open.
• Switches, not forks. haywan.gaming.enable = true; instead of “copy my repo and delete the parts you don’t want”. If you have to fork a config to use it, it isn’t a config, it’s a screenshot.
• Plain dotfiles. Hyprland, Kitty, Waybar and Rofi configs stay normal config files in dotfiles/ instead of being generated from Nix attributes. Nix is a good package manager and a bad INI file.

./install.sh asks a few questions (hostname, GPU, which apps), writes hosts/<hostname>/ and changes nothing on your system — the first nixos-rebuild build is still yours to run. Home Manager keeps your old ~/.zshrc next to the new one as *.hm-bak, because the first time a tool silently ate mine I stopped trusting tools that do that.

What’s in it: Hyprland with Waybar (top + a vertical right bar), Rofi, Kitty, Dunst, swww wallpapers and tuigreet; Gruvbox Material everywhere (the same palette as this site), JetBrains Mono Nerd Font; zsh with Powerlevel10k; NVIDIA / AMD / Intel paths; PipeWire, Bluetooth, Tailscale; and the dev layer I actually need — Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, the Android SDK with an emulator, iOS device tools and nix-ld for prebuilt binaries that expect a normal Linux.

The hardest thing I’ve done with it

Getting iOS development working without a Mac: xtool inside Docker, usbmuxd on the host, a free Apple ID for signing, and GitHub’s macOS runners for the parts that genuinely need Apple’s toolchain. NixOS made it harder in its own special ways — no FHS, no casual curl | sh — and that’s exactly why the final setup is something I can hand to someone else: ios-on-nixos . The device side of it — udev rules, usbmuxd, the Android SDK next to it — lives in haywan-nix  too.

Related: React Native, FilterCam.

Comfortable with

• Flakes, custom NixOS modules with their own options, home-manager, overlays for the packages that need patching.
• Hyprland + Wayland config, and the specific pain of screen sharing on it.
• Docker on NixOS, systemd units written as Nix attributes.
• Linux fundamentals: udev rules, journald, networking, permissions.

Still learning

• Writing derivations that aren’t just mkShell wrappers.
• nixos-anywhere / declarative remote deploys for servers, not just my laptop.
• Keeping closure sizes sane instead of letting /nix/store grow forever.