nix-portable VS podman

There is also nix-portable (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), which is basically a drop-in replacement for normal nix that does everything required for no-root operation by itself when needed. Just put the single binary in your PATH and it's ready.

level (/nix/store/)

Yes, for cache hits to happen it has to be this way as far as I remember.

There is a project called nix-portable though that I've seen some HPC users report success with:

https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

Great work Graham and team, I'll be switching to it on OSX.

I wonder if you took a look at some of the modifications done by portable-nix (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), most important ones being:

a) Allowing user to choose the location of the nix folder (for example $HOME/.nix) by using bwrap or proot

you can install it and forget about it. yeah the major downside is that you need to disable selinux unless you use nix portable.

Yeah sadly nix-portable doesn't support macOS because of missing kernel features. They are also thinking about docker fallback though: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable/issues/23 🤔😋

There is this: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable but I agree we need an official solution

Not entirely true, there are many ways in which you can use a custom location and still take advantage of the binary cache. You can do it with chroot, file system namespaces, bind mounts and so on. There's also a nice user friendly tool that does exactly this [1].

[1]: https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

This is cool! In a similar vein, it's worth mentioning nix-portable is a thing. Same idea of containerization except it avoids docker. https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable

A lot of well-known Docker alternatives emerged at this point, the most commonly recommended of which must be Podman (along with Podman Desktop). This is what I use on my Windows machines, and this was the first solution that I tried on the Macbook as well.

Example of why: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/5102#issuecommen...

Podman

Even though we will focus on Docker for this article, I wanted to mention that there are more container creation and management tools such as Podman, Rkt, and so on.

By using containerization, the application will always have the same configuration that is used in the development environment and production environment. There is no more "It works on my machine". Some examples of containerization technologies are Docker and Podman.

Podman Documentation. Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System.

AFAIK podman either already supports pods in quadlet container files, or will in the near future. https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/20762

Podman as a devcontainers engine doesn't currently work if you use devcontainer features [1] or (and this sounds like you're issue) if you use WSL2.

I haven't submitted the WSL2 issue to the Podman team yet. If you get to it before I do, can you like it here?

https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/18691#issuecomme...

You can also use their Oracle Linux Docker images with the database preinstalled using either Podman or Docker. Just make absolutely sure you are downloading something you are licensed to use, because it seems really easy to accidentally infringe copyright via this method.