WSL 2 is out. Better support for Nix

Development
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I think this will solve our sqlite options with Nix. So nix should be install and go!

Also, I think we can run systemd now, as wsl2 supports Cgroups. This means we can run NixOS on WSL!

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https://mybuild.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/77003 is also worth watching for all the technical details.

Nix should now work great on another distro like Ubuntu.

For NixOS support it’s a bit more complicated than because they ship and run the linux kernel and init system. From the presentation it wasn’t clear what init they were using.

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So, that would be running stuff inside a NixOS container inside an Ubuntu virtualized on Windows? We’re getting a bit deep.

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Yes and wine should work great as well :smiley:

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Don’t forget to enable build sandboxing, too.

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Ideally it would just be NixOS using the WSL2 kernel … But I guess, that might be the easier route to nix on windows initially.

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There’s still no systemd support but it looks like the big issues are solved? Blockers for systemd? · Issue #994 · microsoft/WSL · GitHub

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I want a nixos-win which changes registry entries for me and allows me a reproducible windows.

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Looks like somebody has gotten it working fully with systemd GitHub - nix-community/NixOS-WSL: NixOS on WSL(2) [maintainer=@nzbr]

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been woking upon this project as a base on my spare time. I’ve modified GitHub - nix-community/NixOS-WSL: NixOS on WSL(2) [maintainer=@nzbr] to build a generic image where you can set your username (like in other WSL distros).

I’ve also plugged a GitHub Action to build the image and attach it as a release asset, its available here: https://github.com/Elyhaka/NixOS-WSL/releases/tag/0.0.2

Then, I’ve created the launcher for this image, you can find it as an artifact here: https://github.com/Elyhaka/NixOS-WSL-DistroLauncher/actions/runs/121288892

If you download the launcher.exe and the install.tar.gz in the same directory and then you execute the launcher.exe it should spawn a working NixOS setup.

This is a work in progress, there are a lot of issues in the current setup before building a redistributable appx.

EDIT: I’ve made a more complete post about it

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Looks like WSL just got proper systemd support:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/994

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Nix in daemon mode works but I would prefer to use a proper NixOS without doing hacky thing, is there another known blocking issue that prevents deploying NixOS in WSL?

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There is already some testing going on to get native systemd support into nixos-wsl but you can already use it and the wrapper works really well.

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