Here’s a little series of posts in an attempt to document some of the experiences with Nix as I dive head first into this mythical beast of a system configurations tool that is said to solve all your dependency problems.
Let’s call it Nix can.. and see where this goes.
- Nix can set up your whole operating system
- Nix can set up macos!
- Nix can be daunting
- Nix can launch developer environments
- [in progress] Nix can customize Firefox to your hearts content
Ideas for more*:
- Nix can run reproducible scripts
- Nix can have issues too
- Nix can launch scripts that installs everything it needs
- Nix can launch a repl, from which you can install and debug packages, or play with the language itself
- Nix can be daunting, when stuff fails
- Nix can build your own packages
- Nix can build docker images, crazy fast, simply by copying stuff from the local
/nix/store/into them - Nix can override other packages’ builds, so you can customize them to your liking
- Nix can build and run VMs
- Nix can run VMs on macos
- Nix can build ISO images for a USB stick or a Raspberry PI
- Nix can run on WSL
- Nix can draw graphs of all of a builds’ dependencies
- Nix can build for other architectures that what your on right now
- Nix can build on one machine and send the result to other machines
(*) That might one day become posts. These are mostly things I have not yet tried, but stuff I’ve read seems to suggest is possible.