My laptop died

Yesterday, my daily driver laptop suddenly died.

The charging lights are on and the keyboard backlights are on, but there's no display on the internal screen or when I plug it into an external monitor.

Today, it's gone into a local computer repair shop so I'm writing this email from a different laptop than normal.

The great thing about using NixOS and Home Manager is that all of my laptop's configuration is saved within my dotfiles repository - from the operating system and window manager configuration to the programs I have installed and how they are configured.

I was able to get half a laptop (an old one with a broken lid) working with my external monitor and running with an identical configuration very quickly.

I didn't need to wonder what programs I had installed or how I configured them. It was all available in my dotfiles.

And, because I commit early and often, the code I've been working on recently is all in remote Git repositories and using tools like Nix and Docker, I can get them running again quickly too.