dotfiles

My personal Fedora KDE setup, managed with standalone home-manager via a Nix flake. One repo, one command, and a fresh Fedora box gets my shell, CLI tools, and dotfiles configured the same way every time.

This intentionally does not manage the OS itself — Fedora, dnf, KDE, drivers, and system services stay exactly as Fedora installed them. Nix only owns my user-level home-manager profile, installed alongside Fedora in /nix. See CLAUDE.md for why.

What this manages

• Shell: bash, with oh-my-posh (gruvbox theme), fzf history search, and zoxide.
• Git: identity, SSH commit signing, delta as pager, gh as the credential helper.
• Editor: VS Code, fully declarative — settings and extensions are both defined in home.nix, not clicked through the marketplace UI.
• Terminal: WezTerm, config tracked and live-editable under home/.
• Dev toolchains: .NET, Go, Python (uv), Azure CLI, and a Kubernetes stack (kubectl, helm, flux, kind, k9s, kubectx).

The full, current list of what's installed and how it's configured lives in home.nix — this is a summary, not a mirror, so it won't drift out of sync with the code.

Prerequisites

• Fedora 44+ (or similar systemd-based Linux), x86_64-linux. If you're on ARM, change system = "x86_64-linux" in flake.nix to "aarch64-linux".
• No pre-existing Nix install required — bootstrap.sh installs it.

Fresh-machine setup

git clone <this-repo-url> ~/.dotfiles-src  # or wherever you like
cd ~/.dotfiles-src
./bootstrap.sh

bootstrap.sh will:

1. Install Determinate Nix if it isn't already present.
2. Symlink this repo to ~/.dotfiles (home-manager's config resolves its symlinked dotfiles through this fixed path).
3. Run ./init.sh if local.nix doesn't exist yet: auto-detects your OS username (whoami) and git identity (already-configured global git config, or your authenticated gh user, or your fork's remote owner -- whatever it finds is shown to you to accept or override, never applied silently), and writes local.nix -- gitignored, never committed. This repo carries no identity of its own; every machine needs its own local.nix.
4. Run the first home-manager switch from the flake, targeting whichever OS user is running the script. No username or identity to hand-edit anywhere in the tracked repo.

Neither this script nor rebuild.sh ever calls sudo — home-manager only touches your home directory and Nix profile, never system state. The one exception is step 1: installing Nix itself needs root (to create /nix, the build daemon, etc.), so the Determinate installer will prompt for sudo itself, once, the first time you ever run bootstrap.sh on a machine. Every rebuild.sh after that is genuinely sudo-free.

Daily use

After the first bootstrap, apply any changes with:

./rebuild.sh

Repo tour

• flake.nix — pins nixpkgs/home-manager versions, defines the homeConfigurations output.
• home.nix — the actual home-manager config: packages, shell, dotfile symlinks.
• init.sh — generates local.nix (OS username + git identity), gitignored.
• bootstrap.sh — one-time fresh-machine setup.
• rebuild.sh — day-2 "apply changes" script.
• home/ — the real dotfiles, symlinked into $HOME by home.nix.
• CLAUDE.md — deliberate decisions, for humans and coding agents alike.

How the symlinks work

home.nix uses config.lib.file.mkOutOfStoreSymlink to point paths under $HOME (e.g. ~/.config/wezterm) directly at files living in this repo's home/ directory, via the fixed ~/.dotfiles symlink bootstrap.sh/ rebuild.sh maintain. That means editing a file in home/ takes effect immediately — no home-manager switch required for that file. You only need to re-run rebuild.sh when you change home.nix itself (e.g. to add a package or a new symlink).

Validate without applying

Needs local.nix to exist first (./init.sh) -- path: is required on the flake ref, not the bare ./directory form, since local.nix is gitignored and the default git-tracked-files-only source can't see it (see CLAUDE.md):

nix flake check path:.
nix build "path:$(pwd)#homeConfigurations.$(whoami).activationPackage" --dry-run

Learning Nix

This repo leans on two things you'll want to actually understand rather than cargo-cult: Nix flakes, and home-manager. Suggested order:

1. nix.dev — Flakes — read this first, just for vocabulary (inputs, outputs, flake.lock).
2. Zero to Nix — Determinate Systems' guided, hands-on quick start. Best on-ramp for actually doing things.
3. NixOS Wiki — Home Manager — read the standalone install section specifically; that's the mode this repo uses (not the NixOS-module or nix-darwin-module modes).
4. home-manager manual — the flakes-based usage chapter, for the exact homeConfigurations shape used in flake.nix here.
5. Determinate nix-installer README — what bootstrap.sh step 1 is actually doing under the hood on Fedora.

For later, as references rather than start-to-end reads:

• NixOS Wiki — Flakes
• home-manager source — for looking up specific module options while writing home.nix.
• Determinate's Learn Nix guide index