OMW to install NixOS on my old HP laptop...

@Soblow good luck drgn

(I'm primarily interested in the Nvidia-470, and wanted to test that OS anyway.)

for now, it is a real nightmare...

@Soblow You stuck on anything particular?

@mizah the bootloader.
I can't make Grub from my debian detect properly the NixOS install

@Soblow Ah. I usually have it as the only OS, so not too familiar with that one, sorry.

The manual appears to say "If you dual boot another Linux distribution, use systemd-boot instead." which... Eh?

EDIT: NixOS does like to touch GRUB a lot; adds an entry every time you run nixos-rebuild, so maybe that's why it's acting a bit funny

@mizah it's a bit more complex, debian grub detects nix but doesn't add any entry...

2.5 hours later, I finally booted on NixOS...

@Soblow 🎉

@Soblow ggwp!

@Soblow @mizah you may try installing grub from nixos and using boot.loader.grub.useOSProber = true;, so that it would detect debian

in general, you want to install bootloader from nixos, for bootloader rollbacks to work

@sugar @mizah I prefer keeping debian as bootload master because my laptop bootsequence is REALLY unique (involves loading manually an NVMe driver in an UEFI shell)...

Now the real test and I'll stop for now: Do the NVIDIA 470.XX drivers work?

@Soblow @sugar What are you doing? Chainloading GRUB for NixOS after GRUB for Debian?

:3

Still, a very handy feature of NixOS is that you can hop back to a previous generation if you break something. but NixOS needs to be able to add entries to GRUB for that

@mizah @sugar Nah, I just let Grub (debian edition) detect the various kernel/vmlinuz combinations~

You may check the blogpost I linked in an other branch of this thread if you're curious~