nix VS NixOS-WSL

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...

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...

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

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?