Is anybody using distrobox on NixOS to develop and run software? What are your thoughts on using it?
I feel like it’s a huge time saver and makes the use of NixOS easier for beginners. Instead of spending an afternoon or a few days trying to compile or run something using nix, you can spin up a box and seamlessly do your development there. This makes prototyping and testing things out way easier before investing a bunch of time trying to nixify it.
I agree. Please tell me if there’s a better way
It is. Even though I’ve been using NixOS for some time now, it comes in handy specifically with development tools that require a mutable file system. For example if you want to develop a VSCode extension or use NVM.
You can, but I don’t think it is necessary in most cases. Managing dependencies is one of the things that Nix is best at. You don’t need to compile the software with Nix, but you can use a Nix shell to hack on some software without Nixifying it before hand. Shell’s should make all of the dependencies you specify available to use, as well as setting the right environment variables to work without Nixifying. I only use distrobox if I run into some software that I have significant trouble running on NixOS with a shell, which rarely happens.
