nix VS nix-darwin

(Nix itself is slowly chugging along with Windows via MinGW - https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113/108 and https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1320 , for example.)

Nix is a cross-platform package manager. It uses the nix programming language. Nix and NixOs are often used in the same context, but while the first is a package manager, the latter is a linux distribution based on nix.

Today I want to talk to you about Nixos. What is it? Nixos is a declarative and reproducible OS, partly taking the words used on their own page. What does that mean?

Software developers often want to customize:

1. their home environments: for packages (some reach for brew on MacOS) and configurations (dotfiles, and some reach for stow).

2. their development shells: for build dependencies (compilers, SDKs, libraries), tools (LSP, linters, formatters, debuggers), and services (runtime, database). Some reach for devcontainers here.

3. or even their operating systems: for development, for CI, for deployment, or for personal use.

Nix provision all of the above in the same language, with Nixpkgs, NixOS, home-manager, and devShells such as https://devenv.sh/. What's more, Nix is (https://nixos.org/):

- reproducible: what works on your dev machine also works in CI in prod,

- declarative: you version control and review your configurations and infrastructure as code, at a reasonable level of abstraction,

- reliable: all changes are atomic with easy roll back.

Hopping from one distro to another with a different package manager might require some time to adapt. Using a package manager that can be installed on most distro is one way to help you get to work faster. Flatpak is one of them; other alternative are Snap, Nix or Homebrew. Flatpak is a good starter, and if you have a bunch of free time, I suggest trying Nix.

- it reduces bloat, because you can generate an environment or OS image with only the software needed to run a specific program or service

My guess is that a big efficiency gain would come from the second point, because you don't waste CPU on code that you don't use.

Does this make sense? Has anyone explored this?

[0]: https://nixos.org

1) Setting up the development environment - I currently use devcontainers for most things, but may also dig into nix -> isolated, portable, repeatable development environment 2) Exploring Echo - understand routing, requests, response, etc. 3) Incorporate Templ - integration with Echo, template composition, etc. 4) Integrating TailwindCSS - config for use with Echo/Templ, development cycle, deployment, etc. 5) Add in HTMX - endpoints, template structure, concepts, etc. 6) hyperscript for interactivity - client side interactivity

"Your greatest challenge lies ahead -- and downwards..."

Oh, wait a second, my bad, that's the quote on the box cover for Zork I: (

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/Zork_I_box_ar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork

)

What you really wanted was a link to where you could download Nix/NixOS -- and/or learn more about it!

Here ya go!

https://nixos.org/

"Your greatest challenge lies ahead -- and downwards..."

:-) :-)

I say all of the above in the spirit of humor -- and as a NixOS user and fan!

(But yes, there is a learning curve to it, so yes, learning Nix/NixOS could be a challenge!)

((But you're a bright person, you have Google and ChatGPT to assist you, and you like challenges!))

Semi-related, I would recommend to anyone who is a Linux native to try to find some kind of "minimum viable setup" that is really really easy for you to run out of VirtualBox or Parallels or something for this reason. No matter where you go, you know you can have a suite of tools which work just as you want them to there. Being able to tear it down and rebuild it quickly is also a great way to deal with debugging certain kinds of problems of the "it runs/doesn't run on my machine" category.

How you do this is of course up to you. At one end of the spectrum is just relying on your memory. At the other end is using NixOS https://nixos.org/ to get fully reproducible builds anywhere you go. Between these are a vast field of options. I know a guy who maintains an Ansible file set to `host: localhost` which installs everything he wants from that file. For me, I just stick with the latest Ubuntu version and maintain a few shell scripts [1] that install 80% of what I like to have on a new install.

If you like the scientific approach, you can install something like https://atuin.sh/ and do some statistics on what programs you actually run most frequently based on your long term shell history.

[1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

See https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/issues/838 for making content-addressed derivations supported by hydra.nixos.org. At that point, we can actually try out the XP feature at scale.

Also see https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/8919 for this accepted RFC

Once those things are done, we can get back to merging in the IPFS code.

Now that there is an Nix team and I am on it, there is much, much less of an issue of these experiments being caught in limbo :).

Just a shout out to nix-darwin[1]. It is nix, so initial setup is a bit involved. But then it truly makes it easy to configure everything in one place including mac defaults, homebrew apps declaratively and mas apps etc.

There is a sample config in nix-darwin repo[2].

[1] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

[2] https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/examp...

https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/tree/master/modules

nix-darwin does similar thing for MacOS

You can use https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin

There are many threads around where you can learn more about this (and why it's complicated...), but https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/1341 and https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/issues/139 seem like two of the most comprehensive.

Nix is pretty usable for both desktops and headless servers. Personally, I even use it on macOS without much trouble.

My system looks like any other install of Ventura, but all of my configuration, ranging from the terminal and VS Code to macOS-specific system preferences and Safari, is done declaratively in Nix [1]. The overwhelming majority of my installed software also comes from Nix packages, with some exceptions for stuff that is not packaged yet (e.g., I have Podman Desktop, the macOS ZFS port, Lulu, yubikey-manager-qt installed through Homebrew -- fortunately nix-darwin [2] also just lets me have an set of brews/casks in my config).

It was been a bit of a nightmare at first since the error messages are kind of horrific, and there can be a lack of good examples/docs on flakes. But I think the weekend worth of time I invested was worth it since I no longer need to rely on hacky shellscripts or remember to manually configure anything.

[1]: <https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager>

[2]: <https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin>

Take a look at nix-darwin, this is what I use. It allows you to configure your system similar to NixOS including globally installed programs.

This — I still use mas and brew —-cask through the nix-darwin module, though. It’s not exactly reproducible, but it’s at least closer to reproducible and declarative.