Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#2Here's the project itself: https://github.com/flox/flox
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#3How does it compare to devenv? I have used that for a couple of months and now the gotchas makes me look for an alternative.
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#4Looks interesting, not that far from devenv I believe.
Though I do wonder, would we need those wrapper tools if vanilla nix was more intuitive to use...?
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#5How does it compare to devenv? I have used that for a couple of months and now the gotchas makes me look for an alternative.
What are the gotchas?
I’ve used Nix for 6 months, and it beats Devcontainers at a higher cost, but with less IDE lock-in.
Devenv, as far as I understand, is a convenience layer on top of Nix. Just as Flox is.
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#6I am curious how the company behind Flox intends to make money, I hope they intend to make money on consulting or operate non-profit sponsored by some institutions.
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#7Looks interesting, not that far from devenv I believe. Though I do wonder, would we need those wrapper tools if vanilla nix was more intuitive to use...?
Short answer probably not. You can get most of the way there with nix + direnv. But nix is a complex beast even if you’re only using that little subset of it. I watched the development of this flox tool for a few months now, to me it seems closest to vanilla nix that still gives a nice UX. With devenv there seems to be more guardrails but also more proprietary flavor (the under the hood constructs are not entirely just raw nix)
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#8How does it compare to devenv? I have used that for a couple of months and now the gotchas makes me look for an alternative.
What are the gotchas? I’ve used Nix for 6 months, and it beats Devcontainers at a higher cost, but with less IDE lock-in. Devenv, as far as I understand, is a convenience layer on top of Nix. Just as Flox is.
Wouldn't have said better, devenv and Flox are indeed similar and both uses Nix packages. We can say they are different frontends to the same set of packages, with slightly different features.
Both are great in my opinion.
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#9Looks interesting, not that far from devenv I believe. Though I do wonder, would we need those wrapper tools if vanilla nix was more intuitive to use...?
Short answer probably not. You can get most of the way there with nix + direnv. But nix is a complex beast even if you’re only using that little subset of it. I watched the development of this flox tool for a few months now, to me it seems closest to vanilla nix that still gives a nice UX. With devenv there seems to be more guardrails but also more proprietary flavor (the under the hood constructs are not entirely ju…
I agree. Plain Nix is very complex but highly configurable and allow very complex use case, whereas Flox / devenv are much easier to setup but hide certain Nix features (which are probably not needed in most dev environments anyway, so it's totally worth it given the simpler interface)
Re: Flox, a better alternative to Dev Containers
#10I am curious how the company behind Flox intends to make money, I hope they intend to make money on consulting or operate non-profit sponsored by some institutions.
From what I gather it's exactly this in reverse: they already were a consulting company providing development environment to teams as part of their package, and Flox is an internal tool they open-sourced. (interpreted from what I read on their about page: https://flox.dev/about/)