How I use my terminal

Hi Jyn.

"i don't use Nix partly because all my friends who use Nix have even weirder bugs than they already had and partly because i don't like the philosophy of not being able to install things at runtime."

The first part is mostly true. Nix installs things in a readonly store (/nix/store) so regular dynamically linked binaries don't work. Packaging takes a different approach and when things break, it can be difficult to work around. That said, I've run NixOS for over a year now and I find the benefits are far preferable to these downsides. It's not often I run into bugs, let alone show-stopping ones. What is annoying is how many tools are distributed without the source, so I have to run patchelf on them or use something like nix-ld.

As for the latter part, I think that using Nix will change that mentality. (Note that you can do `nix-env -iA $pkg` but it's not recommended). See, I don't even install things like rust at a global level anymore. I can always do `nix-shell -p $pkg` for an ephemeral shell if I need that, or I encode that dependency directly in the project's flake.nix. If I end up using that program a lot I will make the effort to add it to my NixOS config.

I use Nix exactly because it doesn't allow installing things at runtime. This keeps me from hitting surprises where the runtime environment changes from under me. Containers can partially solve this problem as well but have their own usability issues.

Nowadays I start every project with `nix flake init --template templates#utils-generic`. And put everything in that related to the project. I even had some projects where I had to put 'ssh' as a pinned package as it was used in some scripting and the default macOS and Linux versions accepted different flags.

I also do love that I can do something like `nix run nixpkgs#nmap` on any machine I'm on to instantly run a program with worrying where to get it from. I also use this feature in some of our projects so you can click a link in the admin web interface which is a 'command url' for iTerm2[0] like: `nix run gitlab.com/example/example/v1.0 -- test http://example.com` which will prompt to run that specific version of the command in your terminal, without have to checkout the source repo. In this case it is to rerun specific task locally for debugging purposes.

[0] https://iterm2.com/documentation-command-selection.html

"at runtime" is not the same as "globally". i would love to install things locally at runtime, but the nix evaluator can't manage things that aren't packaged through a nix derivation, and i don't want to have to figure out how to package a random tool on the internet just to be able to run it at all.

Ah I misunderstood. Yes that's a bit more complex. Your options boil down to a) using pkgs.autoPatchelfHook [0], b) learning some nix and writing a derivation yourself, c) using nix-ld [1]. There's also pkgs.steam-run which provides a typical environment expected for games.

A great deal of things are already packaged, but for the most part I find it pretty fast to package something. Once you write a derivation [2] or two, it's not that bad. I never packaged for other distros because they all seemed quite tedious, but the nixpkgs reference [3] lists most things and I can look at the source of similar packages in nixpkgs. It is a time commitment though to learn so it's understandable that it's not really appealing.

[0]: https://github.com/svanderburg/nix-patchtools

[1]: https://blog.thalheim.io/2022/12/31/nix-ld-a-clean-solution-...

[2]: https://ayats.org/blog/nix-tuto-2

[3]: https://nixos.org/manual/nixpkgs/stable/