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The original was posted on /r/nixos by /u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 on 2025-09-24 20:42:34+00:00.

The number 2 complain when it comes to NixOS is the steep learning curve only second to bad/little documentation. I think the concept i have in mind would at least solve 90% of these problems. I believe that NixOS by nature has the potential to become the most user friendly distro. What if we could bridge the gap between the configs and the user by translating the configs into a configurable GUI ?

Previous attempts

There have been some i have observed like the GUINixOS app store and its respective config editor . Which can serve as a proof of concept. Ultimately its very much possible to implement something like that

How ?

I believe NixOS config options could easily be translated in a automated way from code to GUI . For example, booleans become enable/disable switches, strings become text fields, etc.Other options could be mapped similarly.

Home Manager

Sometimes it can be tedious to manually edit configs for apps , it can seem tempting to just change their settings the “non-nix way” .What if, instead, each app that can be configured with Home Manager was linked to a config.nix ? Imagine you can just right-click an app icon and open the GUI nix settings for that app, automatically generated from the available options, just edit them and apply them as if you were using the apps native settings. That would make it effortless to configure any app without ever touching the configs.

Nix Config

Same idea just applied to system settings

I know this might seem like an abstraction of Nix configs, but in reality, it would be a direct translation of the configuration into a GUI, making it easier to understand and manage. After all GUI is but a prettier way to display data. I would love to hear everyone thoughts on that idea ?