On the use of NixOS

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1

Hi all,

it seems, when I read the different topics here, that most of them (nearly all) are way beyond my knowledge in computer science. It leaves a taste of unfinished business for me using this distribution.

I first come to NixOS because there was some sort of fashion for immutable distributions but I finally really like the fact to set (nearly) everything with a single text file.

I would summarize my specific use (other that mail and web browsing) of my distribution by :

  1. some python and julia coding for scientific purpose but limited to my own PC;
  2. redaction with LaTeX

Is there a/some way(s) to use the specific NixOS capabilities to do those things that other classic distributions are not aim to do in the first place ?

I feel like I am hunting flies with a nuke using NixOS so basically.

2

Try home-manager, devshell, devenv or system-manager :wink:

How they work:

image
image846×1161 90.8 KB

Check others:
Ecosystem Mindmap or http://nixos.land

3 Likes
3

Thanks for your answer.

I will give a look at all this.

4

As a (not too elegant) example for devshells, I create shells with different TeXlive versions with Nix (not OS): GitHub - jorsn/texshell.nix: Nix flake providing quick access to multiple TeXlive versions
This can be useful if you submit the TeX source of papers to publishers, and they use particular TeXlive versions.

After nix registry add texshell github:jorsn/texshell, spawning a shell with the right texlive version is simply a matter of, e.g.

nix shell texshell#tl2022
nix shell texshell#tl2021
nix shell texshell#arxiv

Note that old TeXlive uses old Nixpkgs, here, which also means that texdoc won’t work for TeXlive <= 2021.

1 Like
5

Thanks ! That’s a great example.

PS : arXive now runs under texlive 2023 and not 2020 apparently : https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/texlive.html

6

Thanks! The flake aliases inputs.arxiv.follows = "tl2022", since this is the newest version available in Nixpkgs. I just updated the README.