dotfiles

NixOS flake for all my machines: Niri + Noctalia (plus two Hyprland session variants: waybar and qs-shell/Quickshell), Ghostty, Neovim, tmux, and a dev-first setup with local LLMs. Built on flake-parts; home-manager runs as a NixOS module.

Machines

Host	Hardware	User	Notes
atlas	Surface Laptop Studio, i7, 32GB RAM	carter	nixos-hardware Surface module, CPU-only Ollama
kronos	Ryzen 9 9950X, RTX 5070 12GB, 64GB RAM	cjm	LUKS + btrfs, GPU Ollama + llama.cpp heavy mode

Usage

git clone https://github.com/cartermccann/dotfiles ~/dotfiles

# Validate without sudo
nh os build ~/dotfiles

# Apply (or use the `nrs` alias)
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/dotfiles#kronos

update (alias) rebuilds with updated flake inputs.

Layout

flake.nix          # inputs; outputs delegated to parts/
parts/             # flake-parts modules: hosts (mkHost), templates
hosts/             # per-machine configuration + hardware config
modules/           # NixOS system modules (desktop, nvidia, ollama, oom-protection, ...)
home/              # home-manager modules (shell, tools, neovim, tmux, niri, hyprland, ...)
lib/               # overlays + the hyprland palette
pkgs/              # custom package definitions
templates/         # dev-shell templates for `nix flake init -t ~/dotfiles#<lang>`
config/nvim/       # Neovim config, symlinked out of the store so it stays live-editable
scripts/           # shell scripts referenced by modules
docs/              # project specifications, architecture, and delivery plans
wallpaper/

Project documentation

• Dictation application plan

Adding a machine

1. Create hosts/<hostname>/ with a configuration.nix (import the modules you need) and the machine's hardware-configuration.nix.
2. Register it in parts/hosts.nix:

   flake.nixosConfigurations.myhost = mkHost "myhost" { user = "myuser"; };

3. sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake ~/dotfiles#myhost

Desktop sessions

• Niri (Noctalia) — primary session; config in home/niri-noctalia.nix.
• Hyprland — the glass rice (Hyprland 0.55 Lua config), two tiles: "Hyprland" (waybar) and "Hyprland (QS)" (qs-shell/Quickshell); home/hyprland.nix + lib/palette.nix.

Both share ghostty, tmux, and the helper scripts in home/niri.nix.

Local LLMs

Ollama runs in a podman container (modules/ollama.nix); models are preloaded per host tier via local.ollamaTier:

Tier	Hardware	Models
high	12GB VRAM	gemma4:12b-it-qat, Qwythos-9B, qwen2.5-coder:3b, qwen3.5:4b
medium	CPU, 32GB RAM	qwen3.5:4b, llama3.2:3b
low	smaller	llama3.2:3b

heavy / heavy-stop (fish functions) swap the GPU between Ollama and a llama.cpp server running Qwen3.6-35B MoE with expert offload (modules/llama-heavy.nix).

Dev shells

Per-language templates live in templates/ and auto-activate via direnv:

nix flake init -t ~/dotfiles#python   # node, python, go, rust, elixir, zig, java, c, ruby, deno
echo "use flake" > .envrc && direnv allow

Shell aliases and fish functions are defined in home/shell.nix.