Linux

Unfortunately, the UEFI on my laptop doesn't allow custom keys. I can disable secure boot. I can make and place custom keys, but it never switches over from the initial unprotected state to whatever they call that transition state after the new custom PK key is added. Once all the custom keys are configured and I try to reinstate secure boot in the bios, it flushes the custom keys and recreates a new set automatically using the secret Trusted Protection Module key(s) built into the hardware.

Since my initial failure trying to add custom keys, I've come across Sakaki's old UEFI guide on Gentoo and noted the possibility of maybe installing keys with the EFI KeyTool to boot into EFI directly, but I have not tried it.

Do you mean the /nix directory?

Yeah. I wanted to try a flake I came across for an AI app I was having trouble compiling on my own. The flake was setup for a Linux/Windows subsystem though. I tried to install the Nix package manager as a single user because I don't want some extra daemon running or anything that has such an elaborate uninstall as the multiuser Nix lists. At least it is too much to deal with for a short term goal of installing a single app. After installing the single user Nix pm, the flake I was trying to use wasn't listed in the Nix repo and reconfiguring what was already setup looked like a waste of time.

In general I would rather have my entire root directory locked down. I don't really know the real world implications of having a user owned directory in my root file system. It just struck me as too strange to overlook, and it is far too deep into a rabbit hole for my goal that had proved fruitless already. I searched for several of the tools I've had to compile on my own, and none of them were listed in Nix. There are a couple on the AUR but no distro seems to do FOSS AI yet.

I've already been burned by running Arch natively years ago. I dropped it and installed Gentoo which I ran for a few months before switching to Silverblue because I didn't really have the scripting skills to make Gentoo work for me at the time. I'm very weary of any elitist rhetoric about any distro now. When I see stuff like 'Nix is a language you just learn/only for power users,' I have flashbacks of dozens of tabs open in the arch wiki, back when I learned what a fractal link chasm is, and all those times I had to actually use backups to function with Arch; the only time I've ever needed to restore backups in my life. At this point, I think I'm on the edge of transitioning from an intermediate to "power user" after ten years on Linux exclusively, but I know there is a lot of stuff I do not grasp yet. An operating system shouldn't be a project I need to actively manage, maintain, or stop what I am working on for a random tangential deep dive just to use. I can't tell what Nix is like in practice. The oddity of the package manager does not inspire confidence, but I'm admittedly skeptical by default. I see how dependencies are handled better in Nix in some ways, but I do not have infinite storage for a bunch of redundant copies of everything just for every obscure package on my base system. I'm not clear about how Nix does configs and dot files "better" than my present situation. The lack of a deep dive into UEFI security and details about the ability of Nix to coexist in a system with a separate Windows drive (because laptop has a few configuration elements only available in Windows), I haven't tried Nix OS.