colmena VS NixOS-WSL

- rpi nas

I also wipe my entire rootfs every boot with a zfs snapshot rollback[2] using the impermanence module[3] to keep specific stateful data one one of two datasets with regular snapshots: one is backed up with zfs send, the other is just for cache between reboots.

It took a little puzzling to get started, because I didn’t know about the impermanence module, so I built my own hacky solution. But I really love this setup. And the way I don’t have cruft to clean.

Also my backups are so much smaller now :’-)

[1]: https://colmena.cli.rs/

Answering your broader question (secret management) colmena does that for me outside the Nix store. I also use git-crypt to store secrets in the repo. There are also more Nix-y alternatives like agenix.

There are 4 tools I'm taking into consideration right now, but every suggestion is welcome: 1. deploy-rs - I don't know anything about it, heard about it like a day or two ago 2. NixOps - the official one, I don't know what to think, but I have concerns about Flakes compatibility 3. morph - I understand this as "NixOps, but better", no more toughs. 4. colmena - seems to be pretty straightforward with quite nice docs

They shouldn't be, Colmena stringifies the keyFile values which is the same approach as NixOps uses to avoid this. Apparently I implemented that part myself, haha.

I myself use colmena's apply-local. Anyway, totally relate to the meme. Using the same tool to manage your servers and workstations, and reusing stuff between them is amazing.

I have not used it but this might be what you are looking for: https://github.com/nix-community/NixOS-WSL

You could also install the nix package manager on Ubuntu.

This project began as I didn't like that NixOS-WSL used systemd in the background, so I made this for myself. Some of the advantages: faster boot time, smaller image size and a FHS distro in the background, that lets you load dynamically linked binaries (for example, to have VSCode remote working OOTB).

There's a community port of NixOS to WSL2, complete with systemd support, plus Docker Desktop support and some other goodies: https://github.com/nix-community/NixOS-WSL

Nix also works on other WSL distros, provided they're using WSL2.

Nix supports cross-compiling Windows binaries as well. I know some people use it for that.

There is no 'native' support— you can't use Nix as an alternative to Winget or Chocolatey on Windows. Right now a lot of important stuff in Nixpkgs depends on a POSIX shell and Unix coreutils implementation for the basic build environment, and that's shared between many operating systems. Trying to fit Windows into that doesn't really make s sense, and there's not really any momentum behind the idea of using any particular other runtime environment (could be a scripting language instead of a shell + coreutils) for those basic builders.

But it's conceivable that some day, one or more companies using Nix on WSL might see vaiue in taking that extra step and put together a Nix-based package collection for Windows and help get the Nix Windows port out the door.

Basically, I managed to get NixOS inside WSL2 by using this: https://github.com/Trundle/NixOS-WSL

But whenever I try running code . with nixos-wsl(https://github.com/Trundle/NixOS-WSL), the error: `code: command not found` is thrown, also, whenever I try to open nixos-wsl from vscode, it does not work and the terminal throws a bunch of errors?