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  • in NixOS, AWS
  • 3 min read

NixOS XRDP Guide: RDP Remote Desktop Access on AWS (Base NixOS 25.05)

The Base NixOS 25.05 AMI ships with XRDP and KDE Plasma support built in. Most people never turn it on: they SSH in, find no desktop, and conclude NixOS on AWS is terminal-only.

It isn't. A full graphical desktop over RDP takes one uncommented line, one rebuild, and one password — about five minutes end to end.

This is the complete NixOS XRDP walkthrough for EC2: enabling the server declaratively, setting the password RDP requires, and connecting from your machine.

OpenBao GUI on AWS: Enable and Use the OpenBao Web UI Dashboard

Every OpenBao walkthrough starts the same way: open a terminal. Meanwhile OpenBao ships a full web UI, and on the Standalone OpenBao Vault AMI it runs on the same instance as the server — no extra setup, no second host.

The entire first-run flow works from the browser: initialize, unseal, log in. This guide walks that dashboard path end to end, with the CLI equivalents alongside.

  • in NixOS, AWS
  • 3 min read

NixOS on AWS: Complete Setup Guide for Base NixOS 25.05 AMI

Most NixOS tutorials assume you'll install from scratch and figure out the rest. That's a 2-hour detour into dependency conflicts and broken configurations.

There's a faster way: use a prebuilt AMI that boots into a working NixOS system in under 5 minutes.

This tutorial walks through launching the Base NixOS 25.05 AMI on AWS EC2, verifying it works, and making your first declarative configuration change.