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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
by exdsq 6y ago
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.
- _hl_ 6y agoAlthough 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?
- exdsq 6y agoSure in theory but there are a few open bugs: https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2651 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2651 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2292 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2292 https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/1203 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 :)
- matthewbauer 6y agoThe biggest issue IIRC is that Bash doesn't play well with Windows. Things like paths are handled different enough to cause lots of breakage. We could rewrite all of the Bash in Perl or Python, which has better cross-platform support, but that's a lot of work. That said, there have been attempts to get native Windows support: https://github.com/volth/nix-windows/commits/windows https://github.com/volth/nix-windows/commits/windows
- _hl_ 6y agoWhy rely on bash? Windows has Powershell and symlinks, what else is needed to create a nix-style package manager for Windows? I'm not saying it's a good idea, I don't think anyone would really want that, but it could be done.