nixpkgs VS asdf

Noticed it wasn't on Nixpkgs, so... https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/399843

https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd This is a very cool project that I hope will get upstreamed into NixOS proper, eventually.

I always thought InitWare would be good for that. See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/26850 --- we've been discussing this before NixBSD existed, even!

If you are currently involved in managing packages for a Linux distribution, then you might want to use the instructions outlined in the GitHub repo to help you build packages for your distributions. My colleague James Ward has recently done this for NixOS (you can see his PR here)

You can do this with vanilla Firefox using policies.json[1]. Check out `DisableAppUpdate` attribute.

If you're using Firefox from nixpkgs this is already disabled by default[2].

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...

[2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.11/pkgs/appli...

Ah, this is awesome! I currently run k3s on a decently spec-ed NixOS rig. I tried getting k3s to recognize my Nvidia GPU but was unsuccessful. I even used the small guide for getting GPU in k3s to work in nixpkgs[0], but without success.

For now I’m just using Docker’s Nvidia container runtime for containers that need GPU acceleration.

Will likely spend more time digging into your findings — hoping it results in me finding a solution to my setup!

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applicatio...

- Method 1: doesn't really improve layer caching, but it provides a familiar way (via Dockerfile) to use Nix packages. As with any Dockerfile, the creator is in charge of creating layers and making sure those layers are as small (cleaning cache, ...).

- Method 2: Nix language is used to describe (in a declarative way) what the end image should look like. Layers are then calculated based on the dependency tree (or as Nix calls it, dependency closure). The algorithm that creates layers[1] makes sure that there is higher likelihood of cache hits without the user needing to worry about layers, but you can even roll-up your own algorithm that fits your project better.

- Method 3: Using Flox you would get sort of both. An easy way to configure the final docker image via toml configuration and using Method 2 under the hood.

There are other ways how to improve caching efficiency, but those are very use case specific (eg. big "builder" images) and would probably require a completely separate blog post.

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/63f0da03a3b2c323ea924b...

I spent a while messing around with https://github.com/ansiwave/nimwave, which I enjoyed but I haven't gotten very far. Though I've been avoiding the front end for so long, I don't know what reasonable feels like in that space anyway.

My Nim journey was stalled by this bug in its nix toolchain: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/308593. I guess that's the price we pay for straying from the beaten path.

The build will actually fail if Gixy finds any issues.

[1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.11/nixos/modu...

This, but here are some things I've learned to do:

* Use a .local directory under my home directory instead of ~/bin. That's a great prefix when installing from source or tarball at the user level, keeps the top-level of the home directory from getting cluttered with /share /lib /include /etc /lib etc. etc.

* Reach for the package manager first when installing new software, unless there is a good reason not to. It makes keeping things up-to-date easy, and since I use Arch, which uses a rolling release, you pretty much get the latest stuff.

* If I can't get what I want from the package manager, I'll look at what is available using asdf-vm (https://asdf-vm.com/), and failing that, build from source or install from tarball.

* I don't use snap or the like.

I gave up on Windows over 20 years ago, and I can't say enough how liberating it has been. One of the nicest things is that there is a distro for almost every need (see https://distrowatch.com/). I use Arch; but your use case may point to a beginner-friendly distro, such as Mint, Ubuntu, etc., or a repeatable install type of distro, such as NixOS or Guix, or many others.

# Download asdf git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.15.0 # Add the following to ~/.zshrc . "$HOME/.asdf/asdf.sh" # Optional: Completions are configured by either a ZSH Framework asdf plugin # or by adding the following to your .zshrc: fpath=(${ASDF_DIR}/completions $fpath) autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

asdf is a popular version manager that uses a technique called "shimming" to switch between different versions of tools like Python, Node.js, and Ruby. It creates temporary paths to specific versions, modifying the environment to ensure that the correct version of a tool is used in different projects. However, this method can introduce performance overhead due to how these shims work.

I use asdf and direnv to manage my toolchain at the project level, so to improve the integration with Emacs I installed envrc.

Use asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) to manage your Ruby versions.

You should be able to do

$ asdf plugin add ruby

$ asdf list all ruby (you'll see 3.4.1, the latest is available)

$ asdf install ruby 3.4.1

And now you can use Ruby 3.4.1 with no issues. Follow that up with

$ gem install bundler

$ gem install rails

$ rails new ...

The toolchain can be installed via Rustup, or (my preferred way) using asdf.