I am pretty happy with my configs now, with home manager but no flakes so far. I am, however, annoyed by all the dotfiles that I didn’t define, and I’m worried how many other files are laying around without getting imperatively defined.
I’m sort of picturing a kiosk mode, where every time I reboot everything is wiped and I only have what I defined. Any files I want to keep are on other partitions or network locations mapped in my config. If a new config file is created by changing a setting in an application, I want to be notified so I can add it to my Nix configs.
Is this possible? Is it a terrible idea?
The biggest challenge I see is in installing games, because it looks like they often leave bits all over the place.
If you go with the btrfs option, you could change the wipe script to copy all files to a specific location and manually inspect that after reboot.
That sounds clever. I like it.
Never used BTRFS but notes a good time to learn!