nixos-hardware

ware. Of course it works properly...they have a very finite set of hardware to test, which is untrue with Linux. If, when you buy a computer that you plan to run Linux on, you preemptively make sure that the hardware is compatible [1], then it usually works fine. When I bought my mother-in-law's Thinkbook, I made sure that the main hardware worked fine (e.g. graphics card, wifi, audio, etc.). It did, I installed Mint on there, and she seems to like it. [1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware Even if you don't run NixOS, this is useful; if the laptop you're buying has very few or zero hacks required, it will likely work out of the box.

y2 = true https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/258643 It also makes pinning/rollback to a specific version without touching the remainder of the system a spectacular non-event: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/245769 Even when `.package` is not made available it's only slightly harder to use another module with disabledModules + import. > Another evening I sat down to make a minor feature to a Python library and decided to use a nix environment. In theory, this should have been better than a virtualenv. In practice, there’s no in-tree support for specifying specific versions of Python libraries, and mach-nix had trouble with the dependencies Maybe you tried too hard to "nixify" everything, including managing the whole of python stuff. That's what I use: # shell.nix { pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {}, }: let # get these python packages from nix python_packages = python-packages: [ python-packages.pip ]; # use this pyton version, and include the above packages python = pkgs.python39.withPackages python_packages; in pkgs.mkShell { buildInputs = [ python ]; shellHook = '' # get python version export PYTHON_VERSION="$(python -c 'import platform; import re; print(re.sub(r"\.\d+$", "", platform.python_version()))')" # replicate virtualenv behaviour export PIP_PREFIX="$PWD/vendor/python/$PYTHON_VERSION/packages" export PYTHONPATH="$PIP_PREFIX/lib/python$PYTHON_VERSION/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH" unset SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH export PATH="$PIP_PREFIX/bin:$PATH" ''; } And then just `pip -r requirements` or whatever poetry you fancy. On a specific project I needed a bit more control, and some fix because of a braindead build system. Fix once and be done with it. # shell.nix { pinned ? import(fetchTarball("https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/88f63d51109.tar.gz")) {}, }: let # get these python packages from nix python_packages = python-packages: [ python-packages.pip ]; # use this pyton version, and include the above packages python = pinned.python39.withPackages python_packages; # control llvm/clang version (e.g for packages built from source) llvm = pinned.llvmPackages_12; in llvm.stdenv.mkDerivation { # unique project name for this environment derivation name = "whatevs.shell"; buildInputs = [ # version to use + default packages are declared above python # linters pinned.shellcheck # for scripts pinned.bash pinned.fswatch pinned.rsync # for c++ dependencies such as grpcio-tools llvm.libcxx.dev ]; shellHook = '' # get python version export PYTHON_VERSION="$(python -c 'import platform; import re; print(re.sub(r"\.\d+$", "", platform.python_version()))')" # replicate virtualenv behaviour export PIP_PREFIX="$PWD/vendor/python/$PYTHON_VERSION/packages" export PYTHONPATH="$PIP_PREFIX/lib/python$PYTHON_VERSION/site-packages:$PYTHONPATH" unset SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH export PATH="$PIP_PREFIX/bin:$PATH" # for grpcio-tools, which is building from source but doesn't pick up the proper include export CFLAGS="-I${llvm.libcxx.dev}/include/c++/v1" ''; } Sure that's not pure nix or flakesy or whatever, but simply delegating python things to python-land is a very pragmatic move, idealistic purity and reproducibility of everything be damned, it is instantly better than homebrew or docker because that setup gets you a consistent tooling environment on any Darwin (Intel or ARM, at whatever version) or Linux (whether it's NixOS or just nixpkgs). Also it's super amenable to collaborators who don't know the first thing about nix: they can blindly type `nix-shell` and be all the merrier, handling their python stuff as usual, and completely removing a whole class of "it works/breaks on my machine".