Tilde institute is “a public-access UNIX system running OpenBSD.”
You can sign up, ssh in, and play around.
I would find it quite neat to see a NixOS tildeverse node.
Ephemeral explorations of nix are great. But I find long-lived ssh accessible state shared with other nix users has great adoption and learning potential. I wager it would be a more social and fun way to learn nix.
This of course requires more work, energy and time than I have now. But figured I throw this idea out there!
I really like this idea. I’ve registered the domain http://flaky.town (inspired by http://tilde.town and https://trash.town) a few months ago hoping to create something like this. I haven’t had time to do anything beyond the static landing page you see, but I just want to share some thoughts.
One special consideration that comes to my mind is that NixOS can be very storage-intensive, due to often having multiple versions of the same package, especially when different flakes are locked to different versions of nixpkgs.
It seems like in order to share a NixOS instance with a fairly large number of users without using an absurd amount of storage space, it would be helpful to have a way to define a global nixpkgs version for the system, and request that all users refer to it, at least as a general rule.
Also, having some tooling for nix-aware, per-user usage monitoring (and quotas?) would be helpful to identify and resolve resource usage issues.
People aren’t suppose to use these shell systems as builders, I don’t think console tools that may be used there take too much space in the end. You could just run a garbage collector with min-free and max-free and notice users about it.
Sounds splendid @OliverEvans96 ! Thanks for taking that on.
I echo @Solene’s points. As an aside, I maintain a GitLab instance that runs on an Amazon Linux EC2 server where I use nix for multiple project’s continuous integration. I have a job scheduled that does garbage collection: