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If this is of interest, I’ve been publicly releasing a series of educational Nix videos I originally recorded for developers at Shopify that you may also enjoy:

by burke 6y ago

If this is of interest, I’ve been publicly releasing a series of educational Nix videos I originally recorded for developers at Shopify that you may also enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRGI9KQ3_HP_OFRG6R-p4iFgMSK1t5BHs https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRGI9KQ3_HP_OFRG6R-p4...

ssivark 6y ago
That’s great! Is any of that stuff Mac specific, or would all of it apply on Linux also? PS: These are about using the Nix package manager, rather than the Nix OS, right?
- burke 6y ago
  It’s all about using Nix on macOS for now, but a vast majority of the topics apply on Linux as well. And yes, very very little specific coverage of NixOS.
chaorace 6y ago
Just wanted to comment that this playlist is fantastic. Thank you very much for contributing these tutorials!
ShamelessC 6y ago
Just got started and I'm already fascinated with generations and rolling back. How difficult is it to use as a complete replacement for Homebrew? Am I likely to find most of the packages provided by Homebrew?
- danieldk 6y ago
  It's fairly realistic. On my Mac, I only use Homebrew for casks. I have everything else installed through Nix. One of the nicest things is that I have nearly completely overridden macOS' outdated utilities with a GNU userland (without any annoying g- prefix). I also define most of my user configuration with home-manager (both on Mac, NixOS, and work's Ubuntu servers). On a new machine I just run nix run nixpkgs.home-manager home-manager switch My home-manager configuration: https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home
  - ShamelessC 6y ago
    That's awesome. Just finished the video on home manager which seems very useful. Your videos being directed at co-workers actually serves to highlight the usefulness of this tool. "Oh, you're missing dependency x, y and z? Here, just copy and paste this nix command to get my Nix environment." Then you can immediately continue discussing more productive things. I'm curious about generations. If you roll back to a previous generation and then continue to modify that, will the generation be overwritten? If not, is there a way to track only the history of generations that contribute a change to their current generation? Also, I saw you run NixOS in a droplet. Do you have any experience running it locally as a desktop environment? I'm curious how mature it is as a full blown Linux Desktop.
    - burke 6y ago
      Generations are linear, so if you are on 6, roll back to 3, and make a new change (I'm 90% sure) it will create 7. I've used NixOS a liiiiitle bit on a laptop but not enough to really get into it. We're toying with the idea of exploring supporting NixOS as a primary local development environment (and a host for cloud-based development environments) but there's lot of work to do to make that work well.
JamesSwift 6y ago
I had to log in just so I could upvote and thank you for doing these! My biggest issue with nix on MacOS (besides not grokking the DSL even after a couple years) is that there are a decent handful of packages that dont support Darwin. How do you handle those?
- burke 6y ago
  Some of them actually do support darwin and we have a function in our company overlay: withDarwinEnabled = drv: drv.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: { meta = with super.stdenv.lib.platforms; { platforms = darwin ++ oldAttrs.meta.platforms; }; }); but really, we've only run into a couple of things we've cared about that are Linux-only, and just PR'd fixes upstream and duplicated them to our overlay temporarily.
gurjeet 6y ago
Thanks for making those videos! These are the kinds of videos, I think, the newcomers need to see to get value out of Nix. Can you please share what screencasting software/setup you're using? It seems pretty effortless on your part to get your picture-in-picture move around.

by burke 6y ago

ssivark 6y ago

That’s great! Is any of that stuff Mac specific, or would all of it apply on Linux also? PS: These are about using the Nix package manager, rather than the Nix OS, right?

burke 6y ago
It’s all about using Nix on macOS for now, but a vast majority of the topics apply on Linux as well. And yes, very very little specific coverage of NixOS.

chaorace 6y ago

Just wanted to comment that this playlist is fantastic. Thank you very much for contributing these tutorials!

ShamelessC 6y ago

Just got started and I'm already fascinated with generations and rolling back. How difficult is it to use as a complete replacement for Homebrew? Am I likely to find most of the packages provided by Homebrew?

danieldk 6y ago
It's fairly realistic. On my Mac, I only use Homebrew for casks. I have everything else installed through Nix. One of the nicest things is that I have nearly completely overridden macOS' outdated utilities with a GNU userland (without any annoying g- prefix). I also define most of my user configuration with home-manager (both on Mac, NixOS, and work's Ubuntu servers). On a new machine I just run nix run nixpkgs.home-manager home-manager switch My home-manager configuration: https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home
- ShamelessC 6y ago
  That's awesome. Just finished the video on home manager which seems very useful. Your videos being directed at co-workers actually serves to highlight the usefulness of this tool. "Oh, you're missing dependency x, y and z? Here, just copy and paste this nix command to get my Nix environment." Then you can immediately continue discussing more productive things. I'm curious about generations. If you roll back to a previous generation and then continue to modify that, will the generation be overwritten? If not, is there a way to track only the history of generations that contribute a change to their current generation? Also, I saw you run NixOS in a droplet. Do you have any experience running it locally as a desktop environment? I'm curious how mature it is as a full blown Linux Desktop.
  - burke 6y ago
    Generations are linear, so if you are on 6, roll back to 3, and make a new change (I'm 90% sure) it will create 7. I've used NixOS a liiiiitle bit on a laptop but not enough to really get into it. We're toying with the idea of exploring supporting NixOS as a primary local development environment (and a host for cloud-based development environments) but there's lot of work to do to make that work well.

JamesSwift 6y ago

I had to log in just so I could upvote and thank you for doing these! My biggest issue with nix on MacOS (besides not grokking the DSL even after a couple years) is that there are a decent handful of packages that dont support Darwin. How do you handle those?

burke 6y ago
Some of them actually do support darwin and we have a function in our company overlay: withDarwinEnabled = drv: drv.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: { meta = with super.stdenv.lib.platforms; { platforms = darwin ++ oldAttrs.meta.platforms; }; }); but really, we've only run into a couple of things we've cared about that are Linux-only, and just PR'd fixes upstream and duplicated them to our overlay temporarily.

gurjeet 6y ago

Thanks for making those videos! These are the kinds of videos, I think, the newcomers need to see to get value out of Nix. Can you please share what screencasting software/setup you're using? It seems pretty effortless on your part to get your picture-in-picture move around.