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Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

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Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#71

Post by tripdout »

notresidenter wrote: post #21
mkenigs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flox employee here! To start off by addressing how this relates to nix tools: - Our goal is to be more user friendly. You don't have to learn the Nix expression language or understand nix internals to be successful. - We've been able to add some opinionation and polish. Some of that is subjective, but some examples are: - We have a hybrid imperative/declarative interface. You can `flox install && flox list`, and thos…

You know you can just write `nix develop -c zsh` or `nix develop -c fish` or whatever, right?

Does this save environment variables and aliases defined in the Nix devshell?

Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#72

Post by jeanregisser »

gregwebs wrote: post #64

There are several tools in this space now- nix is maturing and people are realizing how useful nix can be for dev envs. * [devenv](devenv.sh) - I am using it and loving it, but worried that the development is not moving forward * [devbox](https://www.jetpack.io/devbox) * [daytona](https://www.daytona.io/docs/usage/workspaces/) * [devshell](https://github.com/numtide/devshell) * [bob.build](bob.build) more focused on…

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.

Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#73

Post by jahsome »

The line about nix making it easier for newcomers in the readme and similar statements always trigger me. I am quite a competent person and I've never once thought "that was easy" when trying to use nix.

I adore the concepts of nix, but the user experience is awful. Maybe that's what this tool solves? It takes a frustrating amount of effort and incessant config tweaking with little to no documentation and navigating seemingly endless already-deprecated methodologies to reach that point. Perhaps I'm just dumb, or looking in the wrong places.

In any case in my experience the end result is every time I see something related to nix, I find myself thinking "I can't wait til that's easy"

Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#75

Post by tmountain »

jahsome wrote: post #73

The line about nix making it easier for newcomers in the readme and similar statements always trigger me. I am quite a competent person and I've never once thought "that was easy" when trying to use nix. I adore the concepts of nix, but the user experience is awful. Maybe that's what this tool solves? It takes a frustrating amount of effort and incessant config tweaking with little to no documentation and navigating…

I love nix and have contributed quite a few packages to the nix repository, and I will vouch that it’s anything but easy. I have a background in Haskell which makes it more familiar, but even the syntax is counterintuitive to newcomers.

Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#76

Post by pasc1878 »

anon291 wrote: post #45
solatic wrote: post #35

One critical issue with "power of Nix without the learning curve" kind of products is that you still have Nix behind the scenes, including the /nix/store, which is intentionally not cleaned up by Nix automatically. So when users try out something that hides Nix from them, their drives inevitably fill up, which is super user-friendly because they have no idea how to reduce the amount of storage used. It's different wh…

Just set nix garbage collect to run every thirty minutes.

The point being asked was how do you do the gc using flex, as the aim is to not have to go inti nix

Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#77

Post by tripdout »

jljljl wrote: post #67
gregwebs wrote: post #64

There are several tools in this space now- nix is maturing and people are realizing how useful nix can be for dev envs. * [devenv](devenv.sh) - I am using it and loving it, but worried that the development is not moving forward * [devbox](https://www.jetpack.io/devbox) * [daytona](https://www.daytona.io/docs/usage/workspaces/) * [devshell](https://github.com/numtide/devshell) * [bob.build](bob.build) more focused on…

Devbox can also run services too. Both products use an awesome process runner called process-compose ( https://github.com/f1bonacc1/process-compose/ ) which is worth checking out (it's even built with nix!)

I think the ability to run services is really what separates Devbox from other related Nix-based dev-env solutions.

Essentially taking what you get from the NixOS-specific configuration.nix options (like for example `services.mediawiki.enable = true`) and letting that be per-project, per-directory, is super useful.

Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#78

Post by jaxr »

jahsome wrote: post #73

The line about nix making it easier for newcomers in the readme and similar statements always trigger me. I am quite a competent person and I've never once thought "that was easy" when trying to use nix. I adore the concepts of nix, but the user experience is awful. Maybe that's what this tool solves? It takes a frustrating amount of effort and incessant config tweaking with little to no documentation and navigating…

Exact same experience here. Been fiddling with nixos for quite a while, but never got comfortable with .nix or flakes. The base concepts keep escaping my mind, I have to revisit every time I have to configure something new and I just got tired. Issues are difficult to debug and you have to go through very specific commands and a hellish filesystem to understand what's going wrong. I love the concept, but I feel like it just gets too much in my way.

Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#79

Post by ivan_burazin »

sandGorgon wrote: post #26

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39616709 a few days back daytona was also released. any thoughts on how it differs ?

Happy to take this one, as I am one of the cofounder of Daytona.

Daytona solves all the automation and provisioning of the dev environment, actually wrote an article here laying out exactly what we do: https://www.daytona.io/dotfiles/diy-guide-to-transform-any-m...

Daytona currently supports only the dev container (https://containers.dev/) "dev env infrastructure as code" standard, but are looking to support others such as devfile, nix and flox.

Hope this helps

Re: Show HN: Flox 1.0 – Open-source dev env as code with Nix

#80

Post by malkosta »

Rucadi wrote: post #69
malkosta wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once needed to install a specific version of a package on my nix environment. It took me 2 hours to find how... After a few months, I needed to do that again, but now the project supported devenv.sh. It took me 5 min. That experience also repeated for other kinds of tasks, for example: start postgres (or redis or elasticsearch or cassandra...), install packages only if the host system is `darwin`, install old versi…

How does devenv help with using an specific version of a package in an easier way than nix (with flakes)? Does it have any kind of simpler syntax for overlays? Or you are referring to pinning a nixpkgs version? I'm not really against tools that make it easier to use nix, I think devenv is a nice tool and I like that it doesn't hide nix, the same way I love home-manager and use it all the time.

> I like that it doesn't hide nix

Yep. That's my main argument for it against devbox.

> Does it have any kind of simpler syntax for overlays?

Yes, it does. But what helps isn't that, but the concise docs with just the information I need to know to get up and running quickly: https://devenv.sh/getting-started/

I've read multiple docs/books on Nix, but I always find myself lost when I need to accomplish anything simple. With devenv, I can spot most of my answers from the docs menu. They are all a single click distant from me.

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