jhvst VS devbox

Plugging my own thing here, but I have been experimenting with a Nix configuration for gaming only. My configuration is here (for Nvidia, which does not work without tinkering as AMD does) : https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config/blob/main/nvidia.nix

First, this is a whole system specification. This means that executing this on Nix will build you a whole OS image. You can build the image if you have Nix by running the first line on file. You can also use Docker with the instruction on my README: https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config

Back to elaborating on the Nix file from the gaming perspective. First, we have the overlays. These are like patches to the packages, and really useful for gaming because it allows building important packages like mesa from the source tip. This is particularly useful when new games or GPUs are released. Same thing for wayland: Nvidia and its proprietary drivers need some patching, but it's possible to get wayland (and sway) to work this way.

Then, I have taken the reproducibility of Nix to a next step in my opinion, and made the system stateless. This means that it runs from the RAM. It is easy to create installation media like kernel, initrd, and rootfs because you have all the steps to create the distribution. This means that here, Nix works as a meta-distro like Gentoo, on top of which you develop your own. Running from the RAM means that theoretically, if you have a working config, and two people with different hardware runs it, then they should have the same experience. If you look at ProtonDB, you often find that some people claim that game X works on their machine with drivers and mesa of Y and Z, but there is no way to copy their configurations because it's certain that the user has made some stateful changes which they have forgotten hence left undocumented, which is the reason it works for them. If everyone would be using Nix, you could reproduce their system and possibly fix your own, but this is not tractable with most OSs.

If you like to test my changes, you can read more about my approach here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/203750

For testing I distribute Nvidia as documented here: https://github.com/jhvst/jhvst.github.io/blob/main/ramdisk.m...

However, I have developed it bit further: if you manage to get into an iPXE shell, you can write `boot -a http://boot.ponkila.com/menu.ipxe`, then select the second option which is Nvidia (proprietary drivers), and with some waiting you will get into a shell prompt to which you can write `sway --unsupported-gpu`, which will launch sway. Cmd+Enter opens a prompt to which you can write `steam`, which will open Steam. Then, you have to mount some drive on another shell with `mount`, and add this as a Steam library via Steam's UI. Then you can play games. I use this on AMD and I have been very happy.

Before I went on my Christmas vacation last year I wrote an article on how I use Nix in my Elm projects. At the time, I was pleased with my set up. However, not even a month would go by before my satisfaction was questioned. In early January, Carlo Ascani asked a question, on the Elm Discourse, about his Umbra project. I decided to explore his project and I soon discovered two files, devbox.json and devbox.lock, I had never seen before. This piqued my curiosity and I had to learn more. I followed the link to the Devbox website and feverishly read the docs. I... was... hooked. I was pleasantly surprised by its simplicity and it seemed to fit my use cases really well.

How does Flox compare to Devbox? https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

I've spent the last year managing all my packages with Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox).

Local dev, cloud dev, CI, production – all with the same config file. Fingers crossed my talk submission for PackagingCon gets accepted. It'd be awesome to share this new way of working with a wider audience.

> Now to figure out what a "flake" is…

Flake is a worthwhile addition to Nix that is worth learning. But like anything Nixian, it's not straightforward.

Have you checked out any of the tools that aim to simplify Nix experience? We built Devbox (https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox) with this in mind.

Also devbox ( https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox ) which is what this is for does not work on windows because of its Nix dependency.

For these reasons, I believe most developer environments should prioritize developer experience over fidelity. Tools like Containerized development environments and cloud emulators can strike the right balance and there’s no surprise that we see increased activity around devcontainers, and similar solutions.

Local first, cloud optional is the only way (IMHO) we're going to get people off their local laptop development setups.

We need to support local dev environments first, with the exact same config a developer can then move to the cloud.

See https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox for how this can be achieved and https://www.mikenikles.com/blog/dev-environments-in-the-clou... for my thoughts after 3 years of working in this space.

If you like the properties of Nix, but find it confusing, you should check out Devbox! It simplifies the process of creating Nix-powered dev environments:

https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox

As part of the work we've been doing with [devbox](https://github.com/jetpack-io/devbox), we needed a unit testing framework to test some of our nix code. Unfortunately we had some use cases where we did *not* want to introduce a dependency on `nixpkgs` (and therefore we couldn't use `runTests`).