

Specialisations can create a new boot entry you can use when starting your computer with your specific hardware connected. You may have hardware occasionally connected to your computer, and some of these devices may require incompatible changes to your day-to-day configuration. NixOS has a unique feature that solves this problem in a clever way - NixOS specialisations.Ī NixOS specialisation is a mechanism to describe additional boot entries when building your system, with specific changes applied on top of your non-specialised configuration. I often wished to be able to define different boot entries for different uses of my computer, be it for separating professional and personal use, testing kernels or using special hardware. NixOS wiki: Specialisation Introduction § I'm grateful to be allowed to publish NixOS related content there, but also to be able to reuse it here!Īfter the publication of the original post, the NixOS wiki got updated to contain most of this content, I added some extra bits for the specific use case of "options for the non-specialisation that shouldn't be inherited by specialisations" that wasn't convered in this text.

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