I've heard cosmic is in the process of being packaged for nix, but on the tracking issue the only things not complete are the video player and the app store, neither of which I care about
Is there any halfway sensible way to get the bits that do work running on nixos? Would quite like to try this desktop out
From looking into this s a few days ago it looked like things were packaged in the unstable channel so you can install them. But from what I read there is no way to configured it via nix configs so you would manually have to write them for now.
There is also this flake which should give some configuration for it but it mentions it might not be dully working yet and I have not yet actually tried it.
I don't expect things to change much in this regard though until they start releasing some more stable versions of cosmic which is still in a prealpha state.
It sounds like you may just want to wait a month or at least the end of this month. Looks like they are working hard on getting to the first alpha in 24.04 according to their post in January
The goal for the COSMIC DE alpha is to feel like a complete product, albeit with features still to come. With a more stable alpha, we can better collect feedback on usability and focus on completing the Settings panels. From here, we can work towards an eventual 24.04 release over the summer.
Though on their latest post on the 17th of April they only mentioned PopOS! 24.04 being released and did not really say much about maturing the prealpha to alpha at all. However they did mention their CEO is going to show off COSMIC DE at LinuxFest Northwest on the 27th
A reminder that System76 CEO Carl Richell and UX Architect Maria Komarova will be at LinuxFest Northwest this year to showcase COSMIC DE.
Might be worth waiting at least until then to see if anything gets announced or timelines get updated. Still only alpha though so may or may not be suitable for a full replacement yet, even if we are getting closer.