The X Window System (X11) provides the basis of NixOS’ graphical user interface. It can be enabled as follows: = true; The X server will automatically detect and use the appropriate video driver from a set of X.org drivers (such as vesa and intel). You can also specify a driver manually, e.g. = [ "r128" ]; to enable X.org’s xf86-video-r128 driver. You also need to enable at least one desktop or window manager. Otherwise, you can only log into a plain undecorated xterm window. Thus you should pick one or more of the following lines: = true; = true; = true; = true; = true; = true; = true; = true; NixOS’s default display manager (the program that provides a graphical login prompt and manages the X server) is LightDM. You can select an alternative one by picking one of the following lines: = true; = true; You can set the keyboard layout (and optionally the layout variant): = "de"; = "neo"; The X server is started automatically at boot time. If you don’t want this to happen, you can set: = false; The X server can then be started manually: # systemctl start display-manager.service On 64-bit systems, if you want OpenGL for 32-bit programs such as in Wine, you should also set the following: = true; NVIDIA provides a proprietary driver for its graphics cards that has better 3D performance than the X.org drivers. It is not enabled by default because it’s not free software. You can enable it as follows: = [ "nvidia" ]; Or if you have an older card, you may have to use one of the legacy drivers: = [ "nvidiaLegacy390" ]; = [ "nvidiaLegacy340" ]; = [ "nvidiaLegacy304" ]; = [ "nvidiaLegacy173" ]; You may need to reboot after enabling this driver to prevent a clash with other kernel modules. AMD provides a proprietary driver for its graphics cards that has better 3D performance than the X.org drivers. It is not enabled by default because it’s not free software. You can enable it as follows: = [ "ati_unfree" ]; You will need to reboot after enabling this driver to prevent a clash with other kernel modules. Note: for recent AMD GPUs you most likely want to keep either the defaults or "amdgpu" (both free). Support for Synaptics touchpads (found in many laptops such as the Dell Latitude series) can be enabled as follows: = true; The driver has many options (see ). For instance, the following disables tap-to-click behavior: = false; Note: the use of services.xserver.synaptics is deprecated since NixOS 17.09. GTK themes can be installed either to user profile or system-wide (via environment.systemPackages). To make Qt 5 applications look similar to GTK2 ones, you can install qt5.qtbase.gtk package into your system environment. It should work for all Qt 5 library versions.