Dotfiles

I’ve been running NixOS with Flakes as my daily driver for a while. The reproducibility is genuinely impressive — declare your system once, deploy it anywhere. But over time the cognitive overhead started to outweigh the benefits for a single-user setup. Every small config change requires understanding the Nix language, the module system, and whether something is managed by NixOS or Home Manager. I wanted something I could debug with basic Linux knowledge without reaching for the manual. ...

I’ve used GNU Stow to manage dotfiles for a while. It’s simple, elegant, and gets out of your way. You organise configs into directories, run stow */, and symlinks appear in $HOME. Done. But once I committed to NixOS as my daily driver, Stow started feeling like the wrong tool for the job — an imperative shim bolted onto a system designed to never need one. This post covers what changed, why Home Manager replaced Stow in my workflow, and when Stow is still the better choice. ...