Steelbore OS Bravais

Bravais is a meticulously crafted, flake-based NixOS configuration implementing the Steelbore Standard. Designed from the ground up to be modular, memory-safe, and visually cohesive, it provides a performant, reliable, and highly customizable system architecture for advanced computing workflows.

Core Philosophy

The design of Bravais is guided by four primary tenets:

Rust-First Ecosystem (Memory Safety): Extreme priority is given to tools written in memory-safe languages. Bravais replaces legacy C-based utilities with robust Rust equivalents—ranging from core privilege escalation (sudo-rs completely replacing standard sudo) to terminal emulators, status bars (ironbar), and application launchers (anyrun, onagre).
Opt-in Modularity: Every feature, hardware profile, and application set is structurally siloed inside its own module using Nix's lib.mkEnableOption. Hosts boot only exactly what they explicitly declare via the steelbore.* namespace.
The Steelbore Telemetry Palette: Color is treated as telemetry, not just decoration. A single Standard §11 palette — Steelbore Modern by default, swappable for any member of the palette family — acts as a system-wide visual identity unifying the interface, extending from desktop environments down to TTY consoles.
Self-Sufficient Configuration: Built with determinism and reproducibility at the forefront. Features minimal external dependencies beyond nixpkgs, ensuring your host builds identically every time.

Directory Structure

bravais/
├── flake.nix                      # Flake entry point (mkBravais helper; per-machine configs)
├── flake.lock                     # Pinned dependencies
├── lib/                           # Custom Nix helper functions
│   └── default.nix                # Color palette definitions
├── hosts/                         # One directory per physical machine
│   ├── common.nix                 # Shared host config (user, shells, toggles)
│   └── thinkpad/                  # ThinkPad (i7-8665U) — hostname + hw + march pin
│       ├── default.nix            # Machine traits (hostName, hardware toggles)
│       └── hardware.nix           # Generated hardware configuration
├── modules/                       # NixOS modules (steelbore.* namespace)
│   ├── core/                      # Always-enabled necessities
│   │   ├── default.nix            # Core module entry
│   │   ├── nix.nix                # Nix settings, flakes, overlays
│   │   ├── boot.nix               # Bootloader, XanMod kernel
│   │   ├── locale.nix             # Timezone (UTC), i18n
│   │   ├── audio.nix              # PipeWire audio stack
│   │   └── security.nix           # sudo-rs, polkit
│   ├── theme/                     # Steelbore visual identity
│   │   ├── default.nix            # Color palette, TTY colors
│   │   └── fonts.nix              # Typography (Orbitron, JetBrains Mono)
│   ├── hardware/                  # Hardware-specific modules
│   │   ├── default.nix            # Hardware module entry
│   │   ├── fingerprint.nix        # fprintd support
│   │   └── intel.nix              # Intel CPU optimizations (x86-64 v1/v2/v3/v4 profiles)
│   ├── desktops/                  # Desktop environments (opt-in)
│   │   ├── default.nix            # Desktop module entry
│   │   ├── gnome.nix              # GNOME on Wayland (de-bloated)
│   │   ├── cosmic.nix             # COSMIC DE on Wayland
│   │   ├── niri.nix               # Niri + Ironbar (The Steelbore Standard)
│   │   ├── plasma.nix             # KDE Plasma on Wayland/X11
│   │   └── leftwm.nix             # LeftWM + Polybar on X11
│   ├── login/                     # Display/login managers
│   │   └── default.nix            # greetd + tuigreet + shell sessions
│   └── packages/                  # Application bundles (opt-in)
│       ├── default.nix            # Package module entry
│       ├── browsers.nix           # Web browsers
│       ├── terminals.nix          # Terminal emulators (Steelbore themed, starship+nushell)
│       ├── editors.nix            # Text editors & IDEs
│       ├── development.nix        # Dev tools & languages
│       ├── security.nix           # Encryption & auth (Sequoia stack)
│       ├── networking.nix         # Network tools
│       ├── multimedia.nix         # Media players & processing
│       ├── productivity.nix       # Office & notes
│       ├── system.nix             # System utilities (modern Unix, Docker + Youki OCI)
│       └── ai.nix                 # AI coding assistants
├── users/                         # User profiles
│   └── mj/                        # User "mj"
│       ├── default.nix            # System-level user config
│       └── home.nix               # Home Manager configuration
├── pkgs/                          # In-tree packages (audio-led, claude-desktop, CRD, ollama)
└── v0/                            # Frozen v0-era configurations (archive)

Color Palette

Declared palette: steelbore (Steelbore Modern) — the Standard §11 default. Per §11.4 a project adopts exactly one palette and never mixes tokens across palettes.

§11.1 role	Token	Hex	Use
`background`	Void Navy	`#000027`	Canvas — every surface
`surface`	Quantum Blue	`#0E2A47`	Elevated panels / cards
`surface-alt`	Deep Matrix	`#0B1A12`	Code blocks / terminal wells
`foreground`	Platinum Mist	`#D9DEE5`	Body text / default readout
`accent`	Plasma Orange	`#FF5E00`	Primary accent / active readout
`structure`	Pulse Violet	`#8A6CFF`	Structure / links / borders
`success`	Acid Lime	`#B4FF00`	Success / safe status / focus
`error`	Mars Red	`#FF3B3B`	Error status
`warning`	Plasma Magenta	`#E445FF`	Warning / attention

#000027 (Void Navy) is the mandatory canvas under Steelbore Modern. Surface tokens are fills placed on the canvas, never replacements for it and never text colors (§11.0.1) — Quantum Blue is only 1.40:1 against the canvas.

Switching themes

Nothing in this repo names a brand color; every consumer reads a §11.1 role token, so the whole system — all ~15 terminals, both bars, every WM, the TTY console and greetd — follows one word in theme.nix:

{ active = "steelbore"; }   # -> steelbore-classic, tokyonight, …

theme list            # every theme, with color swatches
theme show tokyonight # its role table, hex and xterm-256 indices
theme set tokyonight  # rewrite theme.nix, then `rebuild`
theme try tokyonight  # build it WITHOUT touching theme.nix

theme try works because every theme also gets a buildable system of its own, so any of them can be applied without a single file changing:

nix build .#themeSystems.x86_64-linux.tokyonight

These live under themeSystems, not nixosConfigurations, on purpose: nix flake check force-evaluates every nixosConfigurations entry, and a full system costs ~1.9 GB in the evaluator plus ~1.3 GB for each additional one held alongside it. Fifteen of them needed ~23 GB and were OOM-killed. As a non-standard output they stay lazy — the check skips them with a warning, and you pay only for the theme you actually build. theme try therefore activates the way nixos-rebuild does internally: point the system profile at the build, then switch-to-configuration switch.

Registered palettes are read from the canonical steelbore.toml shipped by the construct input, never retyped (§11.4): steelbore, steelbore-classic, steelbore-blue, steelbore-blackpinkpanther, steelbore-matrixgreen, steelbore-navywhite, tokyonight, plus a <slug>-high-contrast sibling of each (§11.1.1).

Local themes

themes/<slug>.nix adds a theme of your own — the filename is the slug. Either derive from a registered palette and override tokens, or bind the roles outright:

{ base = "steelbore"; accent = "#FF8A3D"; }              # tweak one token
{ background = "#0B0B14"; foreground = "#E8E8F0"; … }    # fully custom

A local theme resolves through the same path as a registered one, so it inherits role completion, the hue-derived ANSI mapping and xterm-256 handling for free. Naming a file after a registered slug shadows it — the way to adjust Modern everywhere without forking upstream. Unknown role names, malformed hex and missing required roles are all rejected at eval time.

A fully custom palette is outside the Standard's registered family and carries no verified contrast matrix (§11.4). Deriving from a base keeps the rest of a compliant palette, and its measured ratios, intact.

Desktop Environments

Bravais officially provisions definitions for four primary desktop targets:

Desktop	Protocol	Status Bar	Launcher	Description
Niri	Wayland	Ironbar	onagre/anyrun	The Steelbore Standard — Scrolling tiling compositor
COSMIC	Wayland	cosmic-panel	cosmic-launcher	System76's fully Rust-based desktop
GNOME	Wayland	GNOME Shell	GNOME	De-bloated GNOME with curated extensions
LeftWM	X11	Polybar	rlaunch/rofi	High-performance Rust tiling fallback

Terminal Emulators

All terminals are themed with the Steelbore color palette and launch nushell + starship by default.

Terminal	Stack	Notes
Alacritty	Rust / GPU	Primary Rust-native terminal
WezTerm	Rust / GPU	Lua-configurable, full tab bar
Rio	Rust / GPU	Native GPU rendering
Ghostty	Zig / GPU	Memory-safe, fast
Warp	Rust / AI	AI-powered terminal
WaveTerm	Go / AI	AI-native terminal
COSMIC Term	Rust	COSMIC desktop terminal
Konsole	C++ / KDE	Steelbore colorscheme + profile
Yakuake	C++ / KDE	Drop-down terminal (Konsole backend)
Ptyxis	C / GNOME	VTE-based, GNOME integration
GNOME Console	C / GNOME	Minimal GNOME 4x terminal
Foot	C / Wayland	Lightweight Wayland terminal
XFCE4 Terminal	C / GTK	XFCE4 compatible
XTerm	C / X11	Classic X11 fallback
Termius	—	SSH client

AppImage Support

Bravais provides first-class, kernel-level AppImage support. The programs.appimage module (modules/packages/system.nix) is enabled with binfmt = true, registering a binfmt_misc handler that transparently routes any *.AppImage through appimage-run (an FHS environment supplying FUSE and the libraries AppImages expect). The result: you simply mark an AppImage executable and run it directly — no wrapper command required.

chmod +x ~/Applications/SomeApp.AppImage
~/Applications/SomeApp.AppImage          # kernel routes it through appimage-run automatically
appimage-run ~/Applications/SomeApp.AppImage   # explicit fallback if binfmt doesn't catch it

Conventions:

Target directory. Loose AppImages live in ~/Applications/ (e.g. warp.appimage, waveterm-linux-x86_64-*.AppImage). This is the canonical drop location for manually managed AppImages.
GUI manager. AppImagePool is provisioned via Flatpak (io.github.prateekmedia.appimagepool) for browsing, downloading, and updating AppImages with desktop-entry integration.
Preferred: package as a Nix derivation. When you rely on an AppImage regularly, the Standard-aligned move is to wrap it reproducibly with pkgs.appimageTools.wrapType2 (pinned fetchurl + SRI hash) inside the relevant modules/packages/*.nix bundle rather than leaving a loose binary in ~/Applications/. BrowserOS (modules/packages/browsers.nix) is the reference example — it pins the upstream GitHub-release AppImage and builds a store-resident, march-aware wrapper. The package-manager priority (Guix → Nix → Cargo → Homebrew → Flatpak → Snap) still applies: reach for AppImage only when a tool isn't available higher up the chain.

Per-machine configurations

hosts/ holds one directory per physical machine. Shared host settings live in hosts/common.nix; each hosts/<machine>/ imports it plus its own generated hardware.nix and pins the machine-specific bits: networking.hostName and the steelbore.hardware.* toggles, including the x86-64 march level. The flake's mkBravais { host, channel ? "stable" } then builds a stable + an unstable variant per machine. Adding a machine = drop a hosts/<machine>/ dir + two output lines in flake.nix.

Configuration	Machine	Channel	March
`bravais-thinkpad`	ThinkPad (i7-8665U, Whiskey Lake)	stable (26.05)	`v3` (AVX2; CPU has no AVX-512)
`bravais-thinkpad-unstable`	ThinkPad	unstable (rolling)	`v3`
`bravais`	alias → `bravais-thinkpad` (stable)

The march level is the marchLevel option in modules/hardware/intel.nix (enum v1–v4). Compiler flags are sourced from CachyOS (v1, v3, v4) and ALHP (v2 — the authoritative v2 source, as CachyOS skips v2); all levels use -mtune=native and include pack-relative-relocs in RUSTFLAGS. The four levels are SSE2 baseline (v1), SSE4.2/POPCNT/CX16 (v2), AVX2/BMI1·2/FMA (v3), and AVX-512F/BW/CD/DQ/VL (v4).

All levels share: -O3 -flto=auto -fuse-ld=gold -mpclmul (v2+) and full security hardening (-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3, -fstack-clash-protection, -fcf-protection, -Clink-arg=pack-relative-relocs). -fuse-ld=gold is required on NixOS so GCC can resolve the LTO plugin path in /nix/store.

Flake Inputs

Input	Source	Purpose
`nixpkgs`	nixos-25.11 stable	Core package set
`home-manager`	release-25.11	Home Manager (follows `nixpkgs`)
`nixpkgs-unstable`	nixos-unstable (rolling)	Bleeding-edge package set
`home-manager-unstable`	main (rolling)	Home Manager (follows `nixpkgs-unstable`)
`nix-flatpak`	github:gmodena/nix-flatpak	Declarative Flatpak management
`gitway`	Spacecraft-Software/Gitway (tracks `main`)	Gitway SSH agent NixOS + HM modules
`kimi-cli`	MoonshotAI/kimi-cli (tracks `main`)	Kimi Code CLI agent

Host Configuration Pattern

Hosts toggle modules declaratively via the steelbore.* namespace:

{
  steelbore = {
    # Desktop environments
    desktops.gnome.enable = true;
    desktops.cosmic.enable = true;
    desktops.plasma.enable = true;
    desktops.niri.enable = true;
    desktops.leftwm.enable = true;

    # Hardware — set per-machine in hosts/<machine>/default.nix
    # (fingerprint, intel.enable, and intel.marchLevel are pinned there)
    hardware.fingerprint.enable = true;
    hardware.intel.enable = true;

    # Package bundles
    packages.browsers.enable = true;
    packages.terminals.enable = true;
    packages.editors.enable = true;
    packages.development.enable = true;
    packages.security.enable = true;
    packages.networking.enable = true;
    packages.multimedia.enable = true;
    packages.productivity.enable = true;
    packages.system.enable = true;
    packages.ai.enable = true;
    packages.flatpak.enable = true;
  };
}

Project Posture

Bravais is a personal hobby project — see NOTICE.md for the full no-warranty / no-liability statement. Contributions are welcome but acceptance is at the maintainer's discretion; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Quick Start

# Check the configuration validation
nix flake check

# Show all flake outputs (includes all CPU profiles)
nix flake show

# Dry-run build
nixos-rebuild dry-build --flake .#bravais

# Build without switching
nixos-rebuild build --flake .#bravais

# Switch to new configuration (default alias → stable ThinkPad)
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#bravais

# ThinkPad (stable 26.05, x86-64-v3)
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#bravais-thinkpad

# ThinkPad on the unstable channel (bleeding-edge packages)
sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#bravais-thinkpad-unstable

Documentation

PRD.md — Product Requirements Document and module specifications
ARCHITECTURE.md — System architecture and data-flow diagrams
TODO.md — Implementation task tracking

Package Statistics

Category	Rust-First	Other	Total
System Utilities	47	21	68
Networking	12	8	20
Development	10	8	18
Multimedia	12	3	15
Terminals	5	10	15
Editors	6	9	15
Security	9	4	13
Productivity	4	5	9
AI	2	5	7
Browsers	0	5	5
Total	107	78	185

Maintainer

Bravais (A Steelbore OS NixOS Distribution) | Version 2.0

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 301 Commits
.antigravitycli		.antigravitycli
.github		.github
LICENSES		LICENSES
apps		apps
bravais-mcp		bravais-mcp
flakes/rapg		flakes/rapg
hosts		hosts
lib		lib
modules		modules
pkgs		pkgs
themes		themes
users/mj		users/mj
.gitattributes		.gitattributes
.gitignore		.gitignore
ARCHITECTURE.md		ARCHITECTURE.md
BRAVAIS.md		BRAVAIS.md
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
CONTRIBUTING.md		CONTRIBUTING.md
LICENSE		LICENSE
NOTICE.md		NOTICE.md
PRD.md		PRD.md
Packages.md		Packages.md
PackagesMissing.md		PackagesMissing.md
README.md		README.md
REUSE.toml		REUSE.toml
TODO.md		TODO.md
USER_MANUAL.md		USER_MANUAL.md
bravais-next.md		bravais-next.md
bravais-next.texi		bravais-next.texi
default-apps.nix		default-apps.nix
flake.lock		flake.lock
flake.nix		flake.nix
home.nix		home.nix
implementation_plan.md		implementation_plan.md
system.nix		system.nix
theme.nix		theme.nix
v0.zip		v0.zip

Navigation Menu

Uh oh!

Repository files navigation

Steelbore OS Bravais

Core Philosophy

Directory Structure

Color Palette

Switching themes

Local themes

Desktop Environments

Terminal Emulators

AppImage Support

Per-machine configurations

Flake Inputs

Host Configuration Pattern

Project Posture

Quick Start

Documentation

Package Statistics

Maintainer

About

Releases

Packages

Contributors

Languages

Uh oh!

Folders and files

Latest commit

History

Repository files navigation

Steelbore OS Bravais

Core Philosophy

Directory Structure

Color Palette

Switching themes

Local themes

Desktop Environments

Terminal Emulators

AppImage Support

Per-machine configurations

Flake Inputs

Host Configuration Pattern

Project Posture

Quick Start

Documentation

Package Statistics

Maintainer

About

Resources

Contributing

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

Packages

Contributors

Languages