nixos-shell VS nixos-fhs-compat

Just found this: https://github.com/Mic92/nixos-shell

There is nixos-shell, but I'm thinking about Windows VM's mostly.

>It doesn't work so well for I borrowed my coworker's computer for 5 minutes and want to use my own Vim configuration

You could use something like nixos-shell[1] to spin up a headless VM of your machine into your current shell.

[1]https://github.com/Mic92/nixos-shell

as mentioned, the Nix docker container isnt a full NixOS system, it's just the nix package manager. If you want to try a quick full NixOS setup I really like https://github.com/Mic92/nixos-shell . It spawns a lightweight NixOS vm in the current shell. No qemu or kvm setup or knowledge required.

For testing stuff you can also use nixos-shell

You can, in theory, use https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat for this.

There's also nix-alien to run random binaries and nixos-fhs-compat to FHS your OS (might need some tweaking).

Thanks, it was fun working with containers in NixOS! I tweaked the config a little bit so that the DISPLAY variable is automatically set and I also added nixos-fhs-compat's modules so that the guest OS uses FHS. Overall, a very slick setup if you want to run GPU-accelerated software quickly or what to do software development in a more traditional environment.

There's buildFHSUserEnv as the proper way to run those apps, and there's also a massive hack that I don't really recommend using on your host: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat . If you want to use it, do it with something similar to this: https://github.com/balsoft/kalinix/blob/master/scripts/run-container and then run your vscode/android studio/etc inside that container. The final option is to just run another distro with docker or lxc, set up X11/Wayland passthru to it and run stubborn applications that way.

The root filesystem only contains two FHS-y symbolic links by default: /bin/sh and /usr/bin/env (and some /etc stuff that is hardcoded in some applications and wasn't considered to be worth patching). All the other files are kept in non-FHS-compliant locations (/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/*/default and /run/current-system/sw or /nix/var/nix/profiles/system). This means, for example, that binaries from other Linux distros won't run unless they have been statically compiled with musl (because there's no dynamic linker at /lib/ld-linux.so.2). There's this hack courtesy of Matthew Bauer that links stuff to FHS locations: https://github.com/balsoft/nixos-fhs-compat , but it's not supported upstream and it doesn't change how all the internal Nix stuff works, it's only a wrapper to allow running FHS and LSP-reliant binaries.