It all started when my little guerrilla notebook became unusable. It was a tiny VivoBook with 4 GB of RAM, a 32 GB onboard eMMC disk, and half a potato for an excuse of a CPU. I got tired of fighting it instead of getting stuff done, so I bought myself a Chuwi MiniBook X right in the peak of the 2026 DRAM crisis. This also coincided with the parental leave for my newborn child.
This Chuwi MiniBook X rocks an N150, 16 GB of DDR4, and a cheap 512 GB NVMe drive. It is not a rocket by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly feels like one compared to the previous excuse for a laptop.
So here I was, with a blank slate once again, having to reproduce my system once more. This shit gets tiring after the 5th time you have to reproduce your system, let alone the 50th. Since I like OpenTofu and reproducible systems so much, I decided to give NixOS a spin.
Install was simple, even with LUKS. Slow as fuck to install, though. This is due to the way NixOS works.
I started using it like I would any other Debian, Arch, Fedora, or whichever other distro, by making manual changes to configurations.
But the package installations were different. I would add the packages that I wanted to an array in this configuration.nix file. Badabim badaboom: a nixos-rebuild switch later and they were there. Magic.
After this I wanted full reproducibility, so I gave flakes a try.
30 minutes later I wanted more!
So I added home-manager to the mix.
I started thinking… Man, I really like this reproducibility thing… I bet I can reuse this on all my other computers. At least on the ones with a screen for now… Production is production; I am not putting NixOS straight onto my servers just yet.
So I started splitting the configuration into chunks, thinking about what would go on the work laptop, what would go on the desktop, and what would go on the guerrilla notebook.
Now I’m planning on taking advantage of this parental leave to clean my work laptop and throw NixOS in there too.