 One of the most interesting Linux distributions out there to me is NixOS because NixOS is very unique in the way it does things, the way you install NixOS is you write this configuration file where you specify everything about your system setup. You create your users and you enable all kinds of services, you know, your audio server or you're going to use pulse, pipe wire, yada, yada, yada. You can go ahead and install your desktop environments, window managers, all your various programs, your applications, all specified in this one configuration file. And then once you have this configuration file written, you run NixOS-install and it installs the system for you and it makes this a really nice thing where, you know, if you write this configuration one time and it's, you know, you always install the same programs over and over, you know, with the same users and same permissions and all of this stuff, these kinds of reproducible build systems. They're, I think they're the future of Linux and it's one of the things I really appreciate about Nix and it's one of the things that makes me consider eventually maybe trying to migrate all of my stuff away from arch-based distributions over to NixOS. But one of the problems with NixOS, not for me but for many people that want to try it out, is actually writing that configuration file and doing the installation. It's not new user friendly, right? It's a command line installation and writing that configuration file is going to take some work. You're going to have to read some documentation. It's not one of those things. It's not something you're already going to have this knowledge and you can just sit down and go with it. This is all new stuff, you know, if you've never used Nix. So there's a steep learning curve. Well, NixOS is kind of solving that problem now because they had a new release last week, 2205 and with this new version of NixOS it now comes with the option of using the Calamaris installer, a traditional graphical installer, the Calamaris installer used by most Linux distributions out there. So I think this is a complete game changer for NixOS because before having this Calamaris installer it was strictly more for the advanced user, the power user, system administrator types, things like that, you know, your grandma was never going to install NixOS. Now she can, right? If this works. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and download the latest ISO for NixOS version 2205 and I'm going to run through a graphical installation inside a virtual machine. So I've loaded up the virtual machine here and the boot menu. We have an option for installer and what this will do, I'm assuming it'll take us directly into a live environment. This is going to be the KDE Plasma version of NixOS. You have two different versions. You have a GNOME version and a KDE Plasma version and it boots us into Plasma and immediately it launches the Calamaris installer. Before I run through the installation though, I'm going to go into the menu system here in KDE and I don't need console. I could have done this at the command line but KDE Plasma actually has a tool to change screen resolution. I was actually going to just use Xrander in the terminal but I figured since I'm in a graphical environment, why don't we just use, you know, KDE's graphical tools? I choose 1920 by 1080. I hit apply and yeah, keep this. And now let me resize the installer. So let me move my head out of the way and I'm going to quickly run through this installation. So the welcome screen here allows us to select a language. It's automatically selected American English. That's correct for me. So I'm just going to click next. And then we select our time zone. It has chosen the central time zone in the US for me. That is correct. So I'm just going to click next. Then keyboard layout. It has chosen English US. That is correct for me. So once again, I'm just going to click next. Then let's create our username. I'm going to call my user DT. And let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And repeat the strong and complicated password. And then do we want to create a different password for the administrator account? No, let's use the same password for the administrator account. So DT's password and the root password will be the same. And it's not going to let me click next. You see the next button is grayed out here because it says the password is shorter than six characters. I really hate these safety measures. I don't mind the warning, but if I want a two letter password, just let me do it. So let me create. It's got to be six characters. And it says the password fills a dictionary check. Okay, well, what I just typed is definitely not in the dictionary, but I guess it doesn't have enough different characters. Okay. It can't be a real word, so I'm actually going to have to create like a random string of letters and numbers here. I hate doing this for a virtual machine because I don't use these virtual machines that often. So I hope I remember this. If I reboot and forget my password, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. And now we select our desktop and we can choose from Ganon Plasma XFCE Pantheon Cinnamon Mate Enlightenment LXQ or no desktop. No desktop. I'm assuming would be your traditional command line, minimal installation of NixOS where you write the config file and do all of that. But of course, the point of doing this installation is to actually install a proper desktop environment with the Calamaries installer. So I'm going to choose Plasma and I'm going to click Next because NixOS is fully open source, but it also provides software packages with unfree licenses. Do we want to allow unfree software? You almost certainly want to tick that on because you're going to probably need proprietary drivers, especially for certain devices for hardware support. So I would definitely tick that on unless you know for sure that your computer is fine with strictly free software. And I'm going to click Next. And now we come to the partitioning. I could do the manual partitioning, but I want to see the automatic partitioning in action. Let's see what it creates. So this virtual machine I created a 25 gig virtual hard drive and it looks like all it's going to do is create a 25 gig extend for partition. It's not going to create a swap unless I specify. I want to swap. So if I do swap no hibernate, let's see it creates a 2.5 gig swap. So that's nice. That's not too much space, but for a virtual machine, I think no swap will be fine. So that's what I'm going to choose. Then I'm going to click Next. We get our summary. Location looks good. Keyboard looks good. Unfree software looks good. Partitions. Yeah, all that looks good. I'm just going to click the install button and away we go. Now this portion of the installation typically takes about 5 to 10 minutes on most Linux installations. I'm going to pause the video. I'll be back once the installer has completed and the installation has completed. That took about 10 minutes or so and I'm going to click the button here in the center that says restart now. So if I tick that on and then I click done here at the bottom, it should automatically restart our machine and the machine reboots. We get a grub menu. So the installation appears to have been successful here and we get our login manager this is going to be SDDM which is typically your login manager for KDE Plasma. My password has changed so I remember the strong and complicated password because it was a random string of characters and letters. I've got to think. Oh, cheesy, crazy. What did I pick? I'm not sure. I hope that works. And thankfully that was the right password. I'm going to hit the super key to get into the menu here and I'm going to go into display configuration and let's go ahead and change the screen resolution one more time. This will be the last time I should ever need to do this because now that this is actually installed it should always remember that setting that every time I launch this VM I want 1920 by 1080. So obviously we get a proper Plasma desktop. I wonder what version of Plasma we are using. Let's do about this system. And it is KDE Plasma 5.24.5 It's using KDE Frameworks 5.93 and the cute version is 5.15.3. The kernel that is installed is 5.15.43. Now let me go through the menu system and I'm just going to see what all is installed. I'm going to go to all applications because there shouldn't be that much installed. NixOS is kind of a minimal installation. Really what they want you to do is go into the Nix configuration file and add all of the software you want. This is just for those of you that are starting with Plasma this gives you a very basic Plasma system. So we have of course the Dolphin File Manager we have Alisa for our music player have the Emoji selector we have Firefox for our browser and Kate for our text editor console for our terminal emulator we have Ocular, Spectacle really not much else X term. Wow, there's almost no software installed here out of the box. So we're going to have to install some stuff, right? So let me open up console and let me zoom in so you guys can see I'll make this full screen. So what we want to do is we want to go into our configuration dot Nix file and add some packages and then rebuild Nix with these new packages. So what I want to do is sudo vim because we're going to need sudo privileges to edit this file slash itsy slash I believe it is Nix, yeah, OS and then configuration dot Nix and give it our sudo password which once again I got to remember this new strong and complicated password and oh my goodness vim is not installed out of the box what am I going to do? Surely vi is here. Vi command not found. Is there any chance that something like Emacs would be here? I didn't think so. I was just taking a guess there. I know probably nano is here and I hate nano because I just can't really use it. It's frustrating because I'm constantly doing vim key bindings in nano and of course I don't want to booger up this file by hitting something that I shouldn't. So let me go down here. This is your Nix configuration file, right? Your configuration dot Nix and at some point you're going to see this here. Environment dot system packages equals and then you see this block here, this packages block inside. This block is where you list line by line the programs that you're going to want to install and they obviously knew that people were going to need vim because one of the first things I see here is commenting this vim line here. Let's make sure we keep the spacing correct. It looks like this needs to be placed over twice here. So I'm going to uncomment that wget wget is a standard command line tool to download stuff at the command line and you probably are going to want that installed on most systems. So I'm glad that they had vim and wget here as an example of packages to add. Honestly, if I keep this vm around long enough I'm probably going to eventually want doom emacs installed. So let me install emacs and then later I'll download the framework to go on top of that. I don't need Kate so I can remove Kate. Firefox is fine for the browser. Some other stuff that I like. I like having htop around for a system monitor and if this was an actual production machine and not a virtual machine I mean I would need certain things to do my work with. You know, I need gimp because I do all the artwork for my channel with gimp and of course I would need Kate and live for a video editor and you know that's enough for now. I don't want to make this too lengthy of an installation. So I'm going to do ctrl x to exit out of nano. It's going to ask do I want to save this yes or no? Why for yes? It's going to want to know where to write to and write to the same path. So now we're back in the command line and I believe that when you make changes to your configuration .nix it's rebuild switch, right? So it's we're going to need sudo privileges and I believe it's nix os dash rebuild switch. I hope that's the right command. I actually didn't pull up the nix documentation this time. I've used nix a few times in the past and I thought that was the command and it looks like it is. What this is going to do now that we've changed that config file is going to read that config file and install and remove the software that we made changes to and then we should be able to reboot the machine and get into our new version of nix which now should include things like vim and emacs and gimp and catenlive. So if I do a reboot and now at the grub screen I have nix os all configurations. If I hit enter now there's configuration 1, configuration 2. Configuration 2 is going to be what we just did. So that's going to include vim gimp, catenlive, that's the latest configuration but we have the previous configuration which was just the standard configuration from right after we installed with the calamaris installer and that's what makes nix os really neat is that you can always roll back to a previous configuration. But I'm going to choose configuration 2 and let me remember my password in plasma remember the display settings even though it's a new configuration and now let me go into the menu and if I go into media I have catenlive if I go into graphics I have gimp and let's launch gimp just to make sure they actually do launch that they installed correctly. Looks like it's going to be just fine and let's go ahead and close out of gimp and one other thing I wanted to check let me search for console the terminal and let's make sure that vim is installed so if I up arrow yeah we still have our shell history. So now sudo vim slash nix os slash configuration dot nix of course I got to remember my new password yeah and now we actually get proper vim where I could edit this file just briefly for those of you that have never done like the standard installation of nix os where you actually have to write this file from scratch. I'm not going to cover everything but I'll give you a general overview. The good thing is the default file here that was generated does have comments for example this obviously is your bootloader section obviously we're using grub but I'm sure you could use other bootloaders if you wanted then you have networking so do I want to enable wireless this is a ethernet connection so I didn't need wireless of course very important down here enable networking with network manager I always install network manager on all of my Linux installations because network manager just makes things easy like if you're struggling getting networking working on your like Arch Linux installations or your gen2 installations always install network manager it should be network manager should be part of the gnu core utils really I think it's that important and then we have our time zone locale and all of this of course this was all chosen in the Calamaris installer and of course they placed the appropriate fields here in our config file for us and setting the display server of course it's using x11 but I'm assuming that you could choose the Wayland as an option as well and then enable the KDE plasma desktop so this line here enables SDDM our login manager and the next line enables plasma as our default desktop looks like we've got some other stuff it's sitting our keyboard layout in the next block and then this enables the cups print server if you connect a printer to your next OS installation of course you need the cups server to be running to get your printer drivers and then next is the sound section and they are using pipe wire it looks like pipe wire is enabled out of the box and then we have our user information down here our user DT that we created and the groups that he belongs to he belongs to the network manager group and the wheel group the wheel group is the group you need to belong to if you want that user to have sudo privileges and we have the line that ticks on allow unfree software then we have our package list where we install all of our extra packages that weren't installed as part of the base system a little further down we have SSH it is not enabled out of the box but I could enable that if I needed to SSH into this virtual machine at some point then we have various firewall configuration settings as well and let me quit out of that I think I am done editing that file for now I am really impressed though Nix OS now because it has that graphical installation it really just took it to the next level I really think Nix OS it has already slowly been gaining in popularity I have noticed over the last couple of years especially more and more people are running it but it is always the nerds it is the NIC beards you know it is the people intermediate to advanced Linux users and unfortunately for something to really become popular you know grandma has to be able to install it right you have to be able to give it to your next door neighbor here is a USB stick with Nix OS you know if they cannot get through the installation even if they are a complete noob then you know there is only so much popularity a Linux distribution is going to gain that way I think now with this Calamaris installer I could see this being like the next arch you know where all the cool kids you know kind of gravitate to arch Linux because it is kind of like the best thing going right it does so many things well Nix OS I could see it eventually being by the way I use Nix OS and before I go I need to think of a few special people I need to think the producers of the show Dustin Gabe James Matt Maxim Michael Paul Wess Wanya Balth Homie Allen Armoredragon Chuck Commander Ingrid Diochai Dylan Marstrom Erjan Alexander Peace Arch and Vador Polytech Riela Teetsperless Red Prophet Stephen tools Devler and Willie these guys they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys this quick look at Nix OS 22.05 would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors I depend on you guys the community to help me out if you like my work want to see more videos about Linux free and open source software Nix OS subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon alright guys peace I better write down that password I'll never remember it