STATELESS CONFIGURATION · TMPFS ROOT · DEV LOWCACHE
Volatile NixOS¶
A declarative, performance-tuned, ephemeral NixOS workstation built on Nix Flakes and the
Lix daemon. The root filesystem is a tmpfs wiped on every boot; all durable
state is mapped onto /persist through
impermanence. On top sits a CachyOS low-latency
kernel, UEFI Secure Boot via Lanzaboote, sops-nix encrypted secrets, isolated microvm.nix network
gateways, CUDA-accelerated local AI, and a niri + Noctalia v5 Wayland desktop.
🧬 Ephemeral Root¶
tmpfs root rebuilt clean each boot; durable state and live dotfiles mapped from /persist.
Read more →
🔐 Secure Boot + Secrets¶
Lanzaboote UEFI Secure Boot and sops-nix + age encrypted secrets.
Read more →
🌐 MicroVM Gateways¶
Isolated cloud-hypervisor guests: a Tor transparent proxy and a Tailscale router.
Read more →
🎨 Noctalia Desktop¶
niri compositor with the Noctalia v5 native Wayland shell and a JSON theme engine. Read more →
🤖 Local AI Stack¶
CUDA Ollama + Open WebUI, GPU-passthrough Fooocus, and a custom agent toolchain. Read more →
Quick start¶
# Clone
git clone https://github.com/lowcache/volnixos.git ~/.nix-config
cd ~/.nix-config
# Validate, then build/switch via the canonical Makefile interface
make check # nix flake check
make build # build without switching
sudo make switch # rebuild + switch the live system (HOST=volnix)
If you find this wiki helpful...
If you find this wiki, repo, or nix configuration helpful it would be great if you could
buy me a beer, coffee, a house, you know just what you can spare for the help, if any, I
might have played on your own system. Buy Me a Coffee.
A portfolio, not a distro
The volnix host targets a specific machine (AMD Ryzen + hybrid AMD iGPU / NVIDIA RTX 4050,
ASUS laptop) and is published as proof-of-work — meant to be read and borrowed from, not
installed wholesale.