nixos-wsl-starter VS mise

NixOS is honestly the single most game-changing thing I've been introduced to in my last decade of experience in tech.

If you're interested in trying out NixOS I highly recommend either running it as an WSL2 VM[1] if you have a Windows machine or deploying it on a cheap VPS[2] to play around with.

I personally still use a Win11 desktop for compat with Adobe software and a few other bits and pieces, but I do all my serious work on a NixOS WSL2 VM.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/nixos-wsl-starter

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/nixos-hetzner-cloud-starter

I've been trying to encourage people to give NixOS in VMs a try as a safe way to build up a nice working environment while still maintaining your daily driver until you're interested in/ready to switch. I have a starter template for NixOS on WSL[1] with an accompanying walkthrough[2] if you want to get an idea of how much effort this might require on your part.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/nixos-wsl-starter

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRXXYxq8k4

Where are you getting "mise uses asdf" from? mise is simply compatible with all asdf plugins. Not the same thing.

It's even said almost at the top of the README.md in the "30 seconds demo" section:

"The following shows using mise to install different versions of node. Note that calling which node gives us a real path to node, not a shim."

https://github.com/jdx/mise?tab=readme-ov-file#30-second-dem...

So yes, mise does not use shims. It only manipulates $PATH. I did benchmarks a while ago and that definitely and consistently has shaved some milliseconds off of the startup times of my tools.

mise borrows the plugins from asdf, which also makes it non-cross platform. Interesting discussion on this topic on their GitHub: https://github.com/jdx/mise/discussions/66

Solutions considered include adopting the vfox plugin system or transpiling all asdf plugins to ShellJs.

Now I know that vfox exists.

Why not just use a tool like asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) or mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/)?

These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…

We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.

direnv + mise does exactly that. When I cd to various directories I get different env vars, it's pretty neat. Setting aliases would just be a case of adding them.

https://github.com/jdx/mise/discussions/1525 for an example of how I use direnv with mise.

https://mise.jdx.dev/direnv.html

https://mise.jdx.dev/templates.html

Installed bun js runtime (I used mise, btw)

Not nix based, but I really like https://github.com/jdx/mise too to manage dev tools.

It’s a modern version of https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf written in Rust.

The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).