A big downside is that you will have to install the basic nix package manager to get home manager working. You don’t have to use it to install all of your software, but it will still need a /nix and a system daemon for home manager as far as I know.
It’s part of the package-deal I’m willing to commit to as long as the solution suffices 🙂 .
nix doesn’t play well with container environments
I’m not sure what this means.
Perhaps I should have been more precise, but I (seemed to) recall that Nix and/or Nix’ Home Manager were not installable on rootless containers. Though, I failed at finding sources on this. So it might be outdated or just blatantly false (and thus a brain fart). Thus, I’ll edit the OP to reflect this. Thank you for bringing this to my attention!
What specific things are you trying to do with containers and nix?
The final solution should also be applicable in containers. Thus I thought that Nix and Nix’ Home Manager therefore required to be installed/setup within the container environments as well. I might be wrong to assume this, though*.
If you don’t want to install a bug big (I suppose), complicated piece of software just to manage dotfiles, maybe you could consider Ansible? I know some sysadmin types who keep their local machine configs in Ansible. It has some nice bonus features, like deployment over ssh (nix can do this too btw).
Did I understand you correctly in that you posit that Ansible is more compact, less intrusive and less complicated than Nix’ Home Manager? I’m not comfortable talking about Ansible, but it seemed to me like a grand tool for complete system management (at least for on new installation). Which, honestly, is pretty cool, but seemed to be overkill for what I tried to achieve here. Though, I’d love to be wrong on this. Furthermore, is Ansible container-friendly ?