boostrap VS hydra

I've got something very similar! https://github.com/toasterrepairman/boostrap/tree/main/nix

It's also interesting to hear comments from the Nix detractors here. There's ample room to criticize the language and even the design philosophy behind the package manager, but it's a shame that most people never give it a "proper shot". Maybe that's the fault of Nix maintainers though.

Nvidia works excellent in my experience, Nix provides the best Wayland/Nvidia experience I've had out of any distro. I'm using a 3070ti, but you should be able to steal most of my configuration if you want a similar setup: https://github.com/toasterrepairman/boostrap/blob/main/nix/n...

See https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/838 for making content-addressed derivations supported by hydra.nixos.org. At that point, we can actually try out the XP feature at scale.

Also see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/8919 for this accepted RFC

Once those things are done, we can get back to merging in the IPFS code.

Now that there is an Nix team and I am on it, there is much, much less of an issue of these experiments being caught in limbo :).

https://github.com/nix-community/infra, Community project builds https://github.com/NixOS/hydra, NixOS build server

Nix is pretty cool, and I would say comparisons to Earthly are apt. I may tackle that in a follow-up. If you did a monorepo setup written in nix and then used something like Hydra for building, it might be a pretty nice solution.

Nix seems great for build servers. This is a great introduction to the motivations behind it.

I'm not sold on using it for managing developer environments (another use case it is often used for). It "solves" the problem that developers might be using different versions of libraries or compilers on their machines... but it comes at the cost of having to learn a whole new programming language, a configuration language, a whole new jargon, and workflow. It's a bit like using Docker as a development environment. It introduces a non-trivial amount of friction.

Some folks get excited about package management and configuration. Personally I don't care for it enough to over-come such a high learning curve. And I don't particularly like the workflow it enforces.

However it is pretty great for reproducible CI/CD systems like Hydra: https://github.com/NixOS/hydra

Somewhat related to this, is there a good way to install something from a flake inside the configuration.nix? For example, the hydra flake, since it includes many derivations for dependencies that are not part of nixpkgs (or are at the wrong versions).