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The Flox Open Beta

floxdev.com

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21–30 of 59 posts

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#21

Post by bovermyer »

So it's kind of like machine configuration as code, with Nix doing the heavy lifting.

That sounds interesting. However, I wonder how it deals with scenarios like using "flox pull" to do an initial setup, then manually installing something, then months later trying to reconcile what the code says should be installed and what's actually installed.

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#22

Post by thenipper »

This looks pretty interesting. I'm a lead software eng at a startup that is onboarding N number data analysts/engineers and on the face of it this seems like it'd be a great utility to help tame the craziness of python for them.

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#23

Post by pikanix »

mkhalil wrote: post #19

I can't be the only one with such a bad experience using their website to find out what even is this. Edge Dev on Windows 11 25290 https://i.imgur.com/2VjXnQI.mp4 Yikes.

Thanks for sharing and apologies, will work on improving the Windows / Edge experience. If you want to find out what flox is about, the docs are probably a better place: https://floxdev.com/docs

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#24

Post by ronef »

ianl wrote: post #20

Super excited to see this launch.. Nix at its core is incredibly unique but hard to access. Whats next on the roadmap?

Focus on user feedback, making the developer experience golden for the CLI. Continue to work on widespread Nix community efforts/projects. Then on the product side, expand to provide an even more integrated solution for developers who want to work within teams or even small companies, largely, "bringing Nix to work".

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#25

Post by stavros »

bovermyer wrote: post #21

So it's kind of like machine configuration as code, with Nix doing the heavy lifting. That sounds interesting. However, I wonder how it deals with scenarios like using "flox pull" to do an initial setup, then manually installing something, then months later trying to reconcile what the code says should be installed and what's actually installed.

Have you used Nix? As far as I know, you can't manually install something, at all. You need to add it to the Nix config for it to go in the environment.

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#27

Post by ronef »

mkhalil wrote: post #19

I can't be the only one with such a bad experience using their website to find out what even is this. Edge Dev on Windows 11 25290 https://i.imgur.com/2VjXnQI.mp4 Yikes.

oh my. +1 for calling this out <3 I can link the github directly if it's helpful or send you info. I do apologize for this.

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#28

Post by rockwotj »

This looks great! I'm interested to know what is the path forward to create revenue from this product? I would hesitant to adopt a tool like this that would go belly up when the money runs dry.

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#29

Post by hatross »

ptannor wrote: post #17

I know that this has been asked in past threads but I would love to understand how Nix compares to containers and on top of that what does flox provide in it's comparison to containers?

Nix and flox will give you:

1. A more reproducible environment thanks to nix determinism 2. A more widely re-usable base approach in the form of environments vs containers

with flox, you can develop software in a development environment that matches the way the software will be packaged. Then, you can distribute this software so that someone can just run "flox install" on Mac, Linux, Windos WSL2, or it can be loaded into a docker container image and deployed that way.

Re: The Flox Open Beta

#30

Post by tomberek »

ptannor wrote: post #17

I know that this has been asked in past threads but I would love to understand how Nix compares to containers and on top of that what does flox provide in it's comparison to containers?

hypothetical Dockerfile:

    FROM python
    FROM nodejs
    RUN sh -c 'python ... | node ...'
Imagine this Dockerfile being valid. We want to express the idea of composing these two images into one and using binaries from both. Consider that those might have conflicting /usr/lib contents?! This is easy with flox+nix because that conflict doesn't happen.

There are other benefits such as: - minimal containers - automatic extraction of artifacts and their runtime-dependencies - no more pushing your compilers into prod - no cleaning steps (apt-cache clean) - declarative - reproducible - more fun!

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