nix-installer VS distrobox

This is a way improved[1] version of the official installer, capable of uninstallation among many other things, there is no need to use the official one: https://determinate.systems/posts/determinate-nix-installer

1: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer?tab=read...

The Determinate Systems nix installer is quite smooth: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/

Though it does tend to get clobbered on macOS updates.

and that's just the simple version, on Linux, and thus is likely the happy-path in CI.

When trying to use it locally on macOS, this here is just some "you wanna do _what_?!": https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer/tree/v0.... (not to pick on determinate.systems, the upstream is similarly facepalm: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/installation/installing-... )

I installed nix with the following nix-installer: bash curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | sh -s -- install Now I'm trying to install home-manager and I'm starting from 3.2 Standalone setup with the following command: bash nix run home-manager/master -- init --switch but it gives me the following error message: Could not find suitable profile directory, tried /home/tornax/.local/state/home-manager/profiles and /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/tornax

Alternatively the Determinate Systems Nix installer runs on Steamdeck. They even have instructions for setting up a Steamdeck VM where you can try out anything before buying (other than running games).

Nice write up. But my question would be why not just use the Determinate Systems Nix installer to install nix? Is there a specific reason you went with Guix?

Personally, I like using this alternate installer. I find it a bit easier to work with. https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

You should be able to install both in a container and on the host. And for the install script, no idea why it doesn't work for you, but there's also an unofficial installer you could try: https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer

I've installed Nix on macOS using nix-installer. Now I can start a temporary nix shell using nix-shell -p git direnv as an example, but I need both of these packages "globally" outside of a nix-shell. How do I do this on macos?

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based).

The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected.

I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers.

[1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Distrobox is a tool that enables us to try Linux distro CLI, including their package manager. This requires a containerization tool (e.g., Docker). In Windows, this can be achieved using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

I use containerized versions of things, ubuntu and chainguard images mostly.

You can always create containers with init if that's how you want to do that though. Some distros publish images that come that way: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

Yes, you can do that but I've seen others use something like distrobox to run linux inside of SteamOS: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.md

For such cases you might use something like this: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Btw #3: Depending on what the user is trying to accomplish, e.g. maybe to make WSL(2) itself more of a "subsystem" than a "container engine", using something like Distrobox or nsbox.dev can be a good idea (along with Docker or Podman in Distrobox's case; the other one uses systemd-nspawn).

1. Find here in "Containers Distros" section the distro image that you want to install ("Toolbox" versions are better because they are configured for Distrobox) and get it URL: https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros 2. Use that URL to create Distrobox: distrobox create -i registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:39 -n fedora_1_39 3. Enter Distrobox fedora_1_39: distrobox enter fedora_1_39 4. You are already in Distrobox console. Look at the name in console, it should be include the container name. 5. To exit Distrobox: exit 6. If you run: distrobox list you will see all distroboxes on the system. You will also see that distrobox that we exited is still running. 7. To stop distrobox use commands: distrobox stop fedora_1_39