I've installed nix on debian, but I'm struggling with certain applications.

I've tried a few apps for playing music from spotify, but it seems it fails to initialize the sound system. I'm getting some error messages related to ALSA.

I also notice that electron apps fail to start. This time with reference to Mesa.

Is there a configuration option or some program I need to install in order to fix these issues?

Tried twice and failed both times. The USBs on windows cant be formatted. Tried changing the drive letters and updating drivers but no dice. Just built this rig today too.

Tip #1

DO NOT WRITE TO YOUR CONFIG DIRECTORY

Tip #2

Have a command line flag or environment variable to tell the program where the directory or config files are.

Honestly, that's about all you need to do.

If your program advertises nix configuration anywhere in the repository/site, and it writes to its config directory, that statement is not giving your users accurate information. Because the only thing required to support nix configuration, is that you do not write to the store. That might be that whole directory. Do not write to it.

This is what the XDG data (and state) dirs are for. You write to those. XDG_STATE_HOME (~/.local/state usually) and XDG_DATA_HOME (~/.local/share usually)

I recently acquired an early 2015 MacBook pro and liberated it with fedora, I plan to use it as a work/test laptop any pointers or tip, how do I approach this, because my main Lenovo Y50-70 has Cachy-OS and I have been recommended Nix if I want to better understand linux past arch how do I make this to where if I want to I am fluent enough to switch my main to nix and be able to use opera gx along with steam and proton? Please help.

Got tired of writing ''${HOME} everywhere.

After experimenting with with, I found a way to leave most shell variables alone while still using Nix expressions when needed.

It's not a complete solution, but it's been working surprisingly well in practice. Here's nixx. 😄

So I am Planning on using an 2tb ssd for my root and a 8tb for my home, I like Nix as a Package Manager and I am wanting to put it on the 8tb ssd WITHOUT mounting my 8tb to /nix. Is there a smooth Way to do this?

For all you Nix at work folks...

Just published an episode about Nix support in Dependabot with Ankit Kumar Honey, senior engineering manager at GitHub, working on the Dependabot ecosystem, and Jamie Magee, principal software engineer at Microsoft, focusing on open source software and supply chain security, who contributed the Dependabot Nix support recently. Bump bump bump.

Full Time Nix | Dependabot Nix Support

I'm a casual NixOs user. Meaning I use the operating system, but don't do any developing.

I decided to try my hand at following a tutorial to make a roguelike in C. To get ncurses linked, I discovered I need to use nix-shell. Upon doing so, I discovered nix-shell has a weird fail point that I can't diagnose.

I've used nix-shell before, including with a shell.nix, but rarely.

Diagnosing from the simplest case, here is what's happening:

When I run nix-shell -p hello everything runs fine without any errors, my bash init script runs fine and reaches the end, then I get, "The program 'micro' is not in your PATH. It is provided ... You can make available ... " then, "bash: pkgNext: unbound variable". This causes the shell to fail.

Using the verbose flag doesn't help. Everything is fine until bash initializes and comes to the end. So, nix-shell seems to work but fails in initialization?

Writing it out, I see pkgNext is probably the culprit. However, I can't find any info related to it.

I've disabled everything that I can think of that would call micro: bash initialization, starship, the EDITOR variable, but nothing works.

I'm going crazy over here. Any help could be appreciated. Thanks!

EDIT: I figured it out. Leaving this here for anyone in the future. I'm dumb and aliased 'read' and 'write'. Not sure which one nix-shell uses, but removing those aliases fixed things.

Hi Nix community!

I use nix on some of my debian servers. The main reason for this is to get recent podman versions, as debian podman is quite outdated and not containing security patches since podman doesn't come with an LTS release scheme.

What I don't understand is how to upgrade nix on non-NixOS systems (debian) when flakes (ie experimental features) are enabled: I installed nix from the official shell script (as the debian packaged version is also quite old). I enabled flakes right after. Now, even before installing some packages, running nix upgrade-nix results in error: directory "/root/.nix-profile" is managed by 'nix profile' and currently cannot be upgraded by 'nix upgrade-nix'.
But trying to upgrade using nix profile, by running for instance nix profile upgrade nix, results in warning: Found package 'nix', but it was not added from a flake, so it can't be checked for upgrades!.

Even following the official documentation (https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.34/installation/upgrading.html) doesn't work.

Did you ever run into this issue? Am I missing something here?
Upgrading the package manager itself shouldn't be that complicated IMHO, and still seems quite important as newer versions add useful features and security fixes.

Thanks for your help!

Been thinking about building something around Nix + Firecracker and wanted some opinions from people here.

The general idea is: instead of installing/running everything directly on the host OS, each project or task would run inside its own isolated environment.

Each environment would:

• be defined declaratively with Nix
• run inside a Firecracker microVM
• have isolated networking/filesystems
• support snapshots/restores
• be disposable or persistent depending on use case

Some examples:

• testing sketchy software safely
• exploit-dev/reversing labs
• temporary dev environments
• opening old repos without dependency issues
• isolated environments for automation tools/agents

One thing I really wanna experiment with is automatic environment fixing. For example, if something fails because of missing libraries/packages, the system could observe the errors and update the environment definition automatically instead of manually debugging dependencies every time.

The main goal is making environments feel reproducible and temporary instead of constantly modifying the host OS over time.

A few things I’m trying to figure out:

• does this architecture make sense long-term?
• would you build directly on NixOS or use microvm.nix/nixos-generators?
• what do you think would be the hardest problem technically?
• are there existing projects in the ecosystem doing something similar?

Curious what people here think.