In some cases, it may be desirable to take advantage of commonly-used, predefined configurations provided by nixpkgs, but different from those that come as default. This is a role fulfilled by NixOS's Profiles, which come as files living in <nixpkgs/nixos/modules/profiles>. That is to say, expected usage is to add them to the imports list of your /etc/configuration.nix as such: imports = [ <nixpkgs/nixos/modules/profiles/profile-name.nix> ]; Even if some of these profiles seem only useful in the context of install media, many are actually intended to be used in real installs. What follows is a brief explanation on the purpose and use-case for each profile. Detailing each option configured by each one is out of scope.