trying to keep track of all kinds of messy config files, packages, systemd services, etc. while working on getting Arch working has me really appreciating the philosophy of Nix

in my Arch VM I have a ~/NOTES file where I keep track of any changes that I make to the system so that I can fix them if they stop working or bork something. but the problem is that I have to make so many changes as I troubleshoot things that it would be exhausting to keep track of all of them. and yet it always seems like I’m recording the wrong things, as I have to look up {the location for the config file for that one Python script that auto-generates a pacman mirrorlist} on the Arch wiki for the fourth time (it’s in a directory called xdg for some reason?)

so I’m left with {the information that I need in order to fix my system} scattered across multiple Arch wiki pages (assuming I can remember what to search for) as well as my own notes, which is pretty stressful. plus I don’t have any way to ask the question “what’s the state of the system right now?” like there isn’t exactly a git history for my entire virtual machine

I would really love to be able to organize my configs in a way that makes sense to me, rather than the system, and add lots of comments and documentation for my future self. and also keep all of that under version control

of course, I do not want to make learning Linux any more complex than it has to be so I’m probably not going to actually use Nix anytime soon lol

once I can get sshd working on this VM, though, I’ll probably write a Python script that compares the list of manually-installed packages with a list of packages that I hardcode in the script (with comments for what each package does and why it’s needed, and where to go to configure it, and etc.). that should help make things a little less hectic

@kasdeya
It's worth mentioning that you can use nix as just a package manager without going full nixos and get most of the benefits, but also using nix is just awful sometimes so I wouldn't recommend it for anyone new to Linux.