AntonFriberg's Dotfiles

My personal dotfiles manging packages, scripts and configuration on Ubuntu, Debian and Arch Linux. Managed by Home Manager utilizing Nix.

• Color Scheme: Nord
• Wallpaper: Published on Unsplash
• Terminal: Alacritty
• Editor: Visual Studio Code

Screenshots

Wallpaper

Wallpaper published on Unsplash which grants you an irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide copyright license to download, copy, modify, distribute, perform, and use images from Unsplash for free. See Unsplash license for more info.

Clean

Dirty

Editor

Installation & Management

History

I originally used a simple solution to keep my dotfiles under version control which I found on the Atlassian developer blog. This technique is great since according to comments requires:

No extra tooling, no symlinks, files are tracked on a version control system, you can use different branches for different computers, you can replicate you configuration easily on new installation.

Later, I found yadm, Yet Another Dotfiles Manager, which embraces the same underlying idea but adds a user-friendly interface and tooling.

Currently, I am experimenting with a much more advanced setup using Home Manager and Nix to not only manage my dotfiles but basically the entire user environment. This means the package installation, fonts, window managers, configurations, user services, and much more.

Installation

Install Nix package manager using the Determinate Nix Installer

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install

Make sure that it is working correctly.

$ nix run "nixpkgs#hello"
Hello, world!

Start a new Nix shell with two packages installed, home-manager and git.

nix shell "nixpkgs#home-manager" "nixpkgs#git"

Make sure that the dependencies gets installed correctly and are available.

$ home-manager --version
24.11-pre
$ git --version
git version 2.45.2

Clone this repository to user config path and apply.

git clone https://github.com/AntonFriberg/dotfiles.git ~/.config/home-manager

home-manager switch --flake ~/.config/home-manager

That is it. If the system and user is matching any available setup it will install everything for you.

Troubleshooting

• No prompt in fish after initial startup? Run the following.

  tide configure --auto --style=Lean --prompt_colors='16 colors' --show_time='24-hour format' --lean_prompt_height='Two lines' --prompt_connection=Disconnected --prompt_spacing=Compact --icons='Many icons' --transient=No

• Unable to start Nix applications due to errors such as user: unknown userid 11789

  This happened on work computers after they were omborded with Red Hat IdM. I found two possible solutions.

  1. Specify path to shared library for libnss for nix program

     $ LD_PRELOAD="/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_sss.so.2" <nix program>

  2. Install Name Service Cache Daemon (nscd)

     # For Debian/Ubuntu
     $ sudo apt install nscd

• Unable to start Electron apps such as Chrome, Visual Studio Code, etc from Nix on Ubuntu 24 due to sandbox errors?

  This is due security changes in AppArmor on Ubuntu 24. See NixOS/nixpkgs#121694 (comment)

  Current workaround is to disable the restriction. This can be done for the current session with the following command.

  echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns

  Or perminently by editing the file /etc/sysctl.d/60-apparmor-namespace.conf

  # Workaround for Electron apps from nixpkgs
  kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns=0
  

• Different cursor or blurry rendering in Electron apps?

  This is due to apps running in XWayland instead of native Wayland rendering. Starting the application with extra command arguments forces native wayland.

  --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform
  --enable-features=WaylandWindowDecoration
  --ozone-platform=wayland
  

  If staring the application in Gnome it can be tricky to get the arguments into the application. The easiest is probably to simply copy the desktop file from ~/.nix-profile/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications and edit the Exec= line.

  $ diff ~/.nix-profile/share/applications/spotify.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/spotify.desktop
  < Exec=spotify %U
  ---
  > Exec=spotify --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --enable-features=WaylandWindowDecoration --ozone-platform=wayland  %U

Python & Javascript Development

I prefer to keep Python and Javascript development environments outside of Nix due to some issues I have experienced and known performance issues due to the reproducible builds in Nix. Instead I install these via Mise-en-Place tool.

Mise-en-Place is installed using Nix as usual and configured in modules/terminal/mise.nix. Here I specify which tools I want access to globally.

{...}: {
  programs.mise = {
    enable = true;
    enableFishIntegration = true;
    globalConfig = {
      tools = {
        python = "3.12";
        node = "20";
      };
    };
  };
}

After activating my home-manager environment I have access to mise and can run the following to install python and nodejs.

# Check that mise is installed
❯ mise --version
2024.5.9 linux-x64 (2024-08-12)
# Install configured global tools
❯ mise install
mise node@20.17.0 ✓ installed
mise python@3.12.5 ✓ installed
# Check that it is working
❯ python --version && which python
Python 3.12.5
/home/antonfr/.local/share/mise/installs/python/3.12/bin/python
❯ node --version && which node
v20.17.0
/home/antonfr/.local/share/mise/installs/node/20/bin/node

For local development where I might want different versions of Python or NodeJS I utilize a project specific .mise.toml file.

[tools]
python = "3.10"

[env]
_.python.venv = { path = ".venv", create = true }

Then it works like this.

# Trust the .mise.toml file in the project dir
❯ mise trust project-dir/.mise.toml
# Navigate into the project dir which triggers mise hook
❯ cd project-dir/
mise missing: python@3.10.14
# Mise alerts that tools are missing from installation
❯ mise install
mise python@3.10.14 ✓ installed                                              mise creating venv at: ~/project-dir/.venv
# Mise installs Python version and activates our virtualenv
❯ python --version & which python & which pip
Python 3.10.14
/home/antonfr/project-dir/.venv/bin/python
/home/antonfr/project-dir/.venv/bin/pip

This means that I can quickly switch between different project specific tool versions by simply navigating into them.