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Really looking forward for knowing how Shopify use nix and what problem the find with it. I was advocating for it in my organisation but eventually we decided for a different technologies...
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You can use it on WSL1 and WSL2 but you can't use it natively on Windows. I used it on WSL2 just this afternoon and it was seamless but that makes sense because WSL2 is basically just a Linux VM anyway.
Although I don't see why it wouldn't work on Windows natively. Sure, it would probably need a complete reimplementation to replace all the POSIX stuff with Windows stuff, but fundamentally it ought to be possible?
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2651 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2292 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1203
There's a locking issue with SQLite and the Sandbox has some namespace issues where Linux and Windows behave differently. I don't know how eager they are to make it work on Windows either, but at least WSL works :)
I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
It's kind of a mess. Nix is a collection of tools and systems that together form a highly reproducible build system. Nix is also a declarative, largely pure and lazy programming language that you use to design and specify the different build outputs for the Nix build system. Nixpkgs is, more or less, the only project written using Nix (and a lot of shell). It's a collection of many thousands of "derivations", many of…
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Not a Nix user, but my understanding is that it's a standalone package manager with its own repositories. On a non-Nix distro, installing a package with Nix is akin to installing a Python module with pip, instead of the distro's package manager. It would not be managed at all by the distro's package manager. On NixOS, Nix is the distro's package manager.
Thanks, but I already got that much. It doesn't answer my question though. If Ubuntu has made a modification to a package (that's basically the entire point of most distros, otherwise they'd be Arch), should I expect those changes in whatever Nix installs? It also leaves so many other questions unanswered, like what happens if I install GRUB or a new kernel or something else that's supposed to modify the system globa…
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Not a Nix user, but my understanding is that it's a standalone package manager with its own repositories. On a non-Nix distro, installing a package with Nix is akin to installing a Python module with pip, instead of the distro's package manager. It would not be managed at all by the distro's package manager. On NixOS, Nix is the distro's package manager.
Thanks, but I already got that much. It doesn't answer my question though. If Ubuntu has made a modification to a package (that's basically the entire point of most distros, otherwise they'd be Arch), should I expect those changes in whatever Nix installs? It also leaves so many other questions unanswered, like what happens if I install GRUB or a new kernel or something else that's supposed to modify the system globa…
Things like GRUB or the kernel version are handled at the level of NixOS, because, as you say, they affect the system globally.
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I get that part. I'm asking what the Nix version is like. Is it like the Ubuntu version with all the patches and backports and everything, or is it like the Arch (i.e. basically original unmodified) version?
Nix packages are typically close to upstream, but low-level packages sometimes have patches to make them more reproducible and deterministic, so that they work better with Nix's efforts for determinism and purely-functional packaging. Nix packages are created from scratch, not copied from another distro. Nix is typically one of the most up-to-date distros: https://repology.org/
I'm still confused. What is Nix? Is it an OS, or a package manager? From the looks of it it's a package manager that I should be able to use it on any POSIX system, but I doubt that's the case?
Nix is a package manager. NixOS is an OS which includes the Nix package manager. My understanding is that a feature of Nix is you can declare an OS (I.e. declare the collection of configurations and software etc for an OS) which Nix will process to provide you with an OS called NixOS.
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It's kind of a mess. Nix is a collection of tools and systems that together form a highly reproducible build system. Nix is also a declarative, largely pure and lazy programming language that you use to design and specify the different build outputs for the Nix build system. Nixpkgs is, more or less, the only project written using Nix (and a lot of shell). It's a collection of many thousands of "derivations", many of…
Thanks! So let's say I start installing Nix packages. What distro's packages would they end up most similar to? Say, maybe Arch (which mostly leaves things unmodified)? Does that mean you basically end up with Arch no matter which distro you're on?
Arch is not the only distro that strives for minimal modifications on upstream packages. In fact, most distributions work that way - it's Debian and its derivatives that's the outlier, and these days, even Debian rarely patches upstream packages.
There is much more to distributions than what patches they apply to their packages. The package manger they use, their default configurations, their compiler toolchain, their C library, their init system, their stance on software freedom, etc etc - much more than just what patches they apply to their packages.
But, yes, Nix packages are mostly close to upstream, with occasional patches to improve determinism and reproducibility.
Really looking forward for knowing how Shopify use nix and what problem the find with it. I was advocating for it in my organisation but eventually we decided for a different technologies...
Burke Libbey has a few talks that are available on YouTube including a presentation at NixCon about the work he is doing at Shopify. I would highly recommend checking them out if you are interested in Nix.
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It is pretty easy to be confused. Especially since it is also a language yet all the other replies at the time have writing have failed to mention that. While I like the project as a whole, their naming is horrible. Just wait until you get into `nix-env` vs `nix-shell` etc...
Thanks, yeah. Conceptually I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it since package managers are so tightly tied to an OS... I feel like surely I can't just use it in place of (say) apt or pacman without causing problems? And I haven't even gotten to the language/shell/etc. as you mention...
This is less so with Nix, as it mostly operates on its own folder called nix-store, the binaries in which are then symbolically linked to. It is actually designed to be able to be used this way. I know people are using it on Mac OS and I intend to install more and more packages through it to later possibly transition to NixOS.