The default setup requires root, but everything is does is contained to /nix and ~/.nix* . /nix (the part that requires root) is just a cache, and you can actua

The default setup requires root, but everything is does is contained to /nix and ~/.nix* . /nix (the part that requires root) is just a cache, and you can actually change the location to somewhere user-local in the settings. However, this affects all the package hashes, which will make Nix recompile everything instead of reusing the prebuilt binaries from Hydra.