Our great sponsors
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
bitte
nix
-
Devbox 0.2.0: Automatic Nix Installer, Plugins, and Background Services
Thinking about it like rpm/deb is where you're getting hung up. Think of it more along the lines of npm, but for your OS (or just your profile in the case of nixpkgs+home-manager).
At the most trivial level, you can set up some packages to install [1][2]. You'll generally come out ahead of classical package managers if you do that and nothing else.
Nix also acknowledges the configuration issue. Think of this like copying some config files using a dockerfile. You can either use literals[3], or use the nix language to generate the config [4] (provided that someone has created the required projection from nix to config).
What this ends up becoming is a single git repo with your entire system setup. My repo gets a bit fancier: I have my home desktop (currently Nixos, but it distrohops a lot), my personal laptop running Ubuntu+intune+nixpkgs for work, and then my work Mac machine (which I am aiming to get rid of). The single repo contains nix configs for all 3, and shares config where appropriate.
I really need to write a blog post about Nix in 2023. The main issue with getting started right now is that the installer requires some convincing to use flakes (not to mention that flakes are disabled by default), and you really should be using flakes.
[1]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/system/jono-d...
-
About using Nix in my development workflow
Using these with home-manager is also really simple. You simply enable nix-direnv[0], and then `use flake` in your envrc[1]. Finally, set up your flake.nix with a dev shell[2] (I'm definitely going to take a look at numtide's devshell).
You'll also need flakes and the nix command enabled first [4] (add that line to `/etc/nix/nix.conf` if you aren't using nixos).
Why use flakes? Mostly because it has a lockfile: there's a really good chance that "works on my machine" is "works on my team's machines." Flakes are also much cleaner than vanilla Nix.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/home/general.... [1]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/.envrc#L3 [2]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/main/flake.nix#L65 [4]: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix/-/blob/70844981d5cd63c839...
-
How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops
The nice thing with flake-based NixOS is that it's trivial to cherry-pick unstable onto a stable base. I do a bunch of that in my nixconfigs: https://gitlab.com/jcdickinson/nix
What are some alternatives?
nomad-driver-nix - A Nomad task driver for systemd-nspawn
NixOS-WSL - NixOS on WSL(2) [maintainer=@nzbr]
cue - The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration
direnv-nix-lorelei - Alternative Nix extension of Direnv
nix-cue - Validate and generate configuration files using Nix and Cue
nix-direnv - A fast, persistent use_nix/use_flake implementation for direnv [maintainer=@Mic92 / @bbenne10]
nixpkgs - Nix Packages collection & NixOS