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Discussion on: Setting up a new dev machine

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Nikhil • Edited

I have been playing with Nix package manager which provides reproducibility. And Nix package manager can be installed on most Linux distros and MacOS. This means you don't necessarily need to use NixOS to take advantage of Nix package manager. Just install Ubuntu, Debian, Arch or in MacOS and install Nix package manager. Another thing is that once you have setup nix and have a nix configuration file, all you have to do is run a command to reproduce the same result in a system. No more starting from scratch.

Another cool thing I am yet to play with is that you can use multiple versions of a package and use each version independently with nix package manager. This means AFAIK, I can have two versions of nginx and use both versions independently at the same time.

Nix repo have most of the apps necessary for a developer. IMO lesser packages than Arch repos including AUR and larger than a lot of the Linux distros.I can get latest stable packages like other rolling distros with unstable channel of nix. This will be my future. I would recommend checking it out -> nixos.org/learn.html.