Beyond package management: How Nix refactored my digital life

Summary

(You can find my Nix config over on Github)I'm a disorganised person. My workflow is to bounce around a codebase for days/weeks at a time and when I come up for air I'll usually have left a slew of configs, tools, scripts, repos scattered around my computer like the socks near the bed, or the pile of paperwork on my desk. After a while I reach a point where it all becomes unmanageable. I'll wade on (unproductively) until I can't go any further, then reset my laptop and spend a week reconfiguring the system, tooling, and getting projects running again. So when I discovered Nix (about 12 months back) it sounded too good to be true: a declarative package manager with reproducible builds and pinned package versions. Even better, NixOS applies these principles to your entire operating system! I was incredibly excited by it but then got horrendously bogged down in my first system config. I shelved it as something to come back to when I had more time. Several months later I gave it another try and spent the time needed to understand how to properly configure it. Result? Well let's just say I'm never going back -boy oh boy, Nix is wild! In this post, I'll walk you through my journey: reviving an old Pixelbook with NixOS, wrangling my MacBook with nix-darwin, and super-charging Nix with AI to solve a problem I thought was unsolvable.NixOS on an old PixelbookI gave Nix a second chance as I had a slow old Pixelbook Go (2017 Chromebook that I'd picked-up cheap on ebay). It frustrated me how sluggish it was despite being reasonably well-specced. I disabled the BIOS write protection (using the excellent guides at MrChromebox) and replaced it with Coreboot, an open-source BIOS that allowed me to install NixOS (the process was more involved than expected, requiring me to physically disconnect the battery to disable write protection!). Getting a simple NixOS system running was simple and I was instantly blown away by the speed! The Pixelbook (now a Nixelbook) had never felt so snapp...