nix-bundle

There are things like this. The things I know of and can think of off the top of my head are: 1. appimage https://appimage.org/ 2. nix-bundle https://github.com/nix-community/nix-bundle 3. guix via guix pack 4. A small collection of random small projects hardly anyone uses for docker to do this (i.e. https://github.com/NilsIrl/dockerc ) 5. A docker image (a package that runs everywhere, assuming a docker runtime is available) 6. https://flatpak.org/ 7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap_(software) AppImage is the closest to what you want I think.

mentioned in another comment, there are ways to bundle nix derivations into standalone run-on-any-linux binaries: https://github.com/nix-community/nix-bundle

There is nix-bundle (which I admittedly have never had a reason to use) https://github.com/nix-community/nix-bundle

There's an older attempt at a universal Nix bundler here: https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle The flake schema has a "bundler" output that can point to an executable like this to bundle a flake's outputs for any supported target. Not sure about the state of the art, though.

In the past I've used and recommended nix-bundle¹ or its first-party counterpart `nix bundle`² for this. That lets you skip the step of managing the creation of the Docker image, which is nice. I suppose dockerc could be convenient when you already have a Docker image on hand, especially if it was a PITA to create or its creation is a lost art. Besides fat executables, `nix bundle` also lets you create Docker images, AppImages, and images/executables in a few other formats. -- 1: https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle 2: https://nixos.org/manual/nix/unstable/command-ref/new-cli/ni...

> (Thankfully full-blown simulation is often an option nowadays too) Yes, and I think its fair to assume that some backend to execute the x86-64 Linux ABI will out-live most readers. Projects like https://justine.lol/ape.html, https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.... or https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle do make it approachable to "bundle" a lot of software down to libc.

I admit that there is an element of, "but I chose an obscure and challenging linux variant, waaah why isn't it supported" here, but (a) there's currently no flatpak and (b) when, for goodness sakes, will major linux projects begin packaging for Nix/NixOS as a matter of course? It's not hard, and the benefits go far outside merely supporting Nix, as e.g. a flake.nix file would allow this project to generate docker images, and appImage images, as basically afterthoughts. (See e.g. https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle.) Nix flake support would also provide a perfectly reproducible build environment, which can help clarify dependencies, and thus help the project build achieve idempotence, but I'll save the full shill for some github issue. In fact, I'm inclined to roll up my shirtsleeves and help make this real, at least for Thunderbird

On systems that have the same containerization feature that Docker requires, i.e., Linux systems with recent kernels, you can use nix-bundle¹ or the flakes-based experimental command inspired by it, `nix bundle`² to generate an all-in-one binary that you can run without installing Nix on the target. 1: https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle 2: https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers

Nix itself is more focused on "distribute from this host with nix, to this other host with nix". Though, here is e.g. https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle, which is supported as an experimental command in nix 2.4.

Yes, it's extremely powerful once you truly understand Nix. There are efforts to improve documentation, but it still is lacking (I think the biggest problem is that Nix is so big, not just the OS but it can be utilized as a build system). Just with NixOS is not exactly clear how can you for example build your custom image. I think https://nix.dev/ is approaching the documentation from the right direction. There are also many pieces that people built that you need to find. For example some things that I found accidentally: * https://github.com/nix-community/poetry2nix * https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle * https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os Unfortunately those side projects often have even worse documentation.

Nix has a very similar tool called nix-bundle[1]. [1]: https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle