The nixos-unstable channel actually does ensure a minimum set of required packages work: Those that would prevent you from booting. The compiling-from-source is because Hydra (the binary cache) only starts building once a package appears in nixpkgs-unstable, and if it immediately proceeds into nixos-unstable, or one of its dependencies is different there, that build won’t be finished yet. release- and versioned nixos- don’t have that problem, as they have a merge freeze, and are mostly fast-forwarded along unstable.

What would be good is a mechanism for Hydra to tell you “I tried to build this derivation, and it failed.” For this, Nix first needs to store build failure, and since store paths are input-addressed by default, you can also skip builds that will certainly still fail.

I used to use an old consumer Yoga, and now a new ThinkPad. Some say it’s the wrong way around, I say I want more than 2 cores and 8GiB of RAM. (Un-)Fortunately, I got hooked on the Nix and Tiling-WM drugs quite soon, and so there wasn’t a lot of distrohopping.

1. Create your own Codeberg repo for your configuration
2. Use Neovim, maybe with Nixvim

How do I do that with the SSD cache? Everyone just talks about it, but I can’t find any documentation…

I have them at home and as such don‘t need to spend money on them.

Follow up question: Do I need a separate CPU cooler, or is the boxed Wraith enough? And how loud is it? I can’t really find info on that.

The NAS drives are here because they are from an old NAS which only uses a cheap dual-core Intel, has 2G of RAM, and boots from eMMC. So anything would be an upgrade…

It stores one of the keys to my LUKS volume.

I do actually use the TPM for disk encryption and Measured Boot, and can’t simply disable it.