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by Nullabillity 2749 days ago
> The only non-system package manager that provides Python and its own toolchains - for Linux and macOS presently - which are used to compile every C, C++ and Fortran package, including Python itself is conda and the Anaconda Distribution.

Nix[0] is also perfectly usable without NixOS, and provides all of that, but has far more non-Python libraries and applications packaged. It's also not constantly trying to sell you an enterprise version...

[0]: https://nixos.org/nix/
1 comments
RayDonnelly 2749 days ago
Great I'll try it out, I always meant to but never got round to it. Does it work on macOS or Windows yet? What's the oldest Linux distro upon which it will run?

Not sure we constantly try to sell our Enterprise product. You could look at it less cynically as we sell an Enterprise product to allow us to provide the Anaconda Distribution for free.

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chriswarbo 2749 days ago
A lot of Nix users seem to use Mac, based on the stuff that comes up on the mailing list (discourse).

There's no "native" Windows support (yet), but I think it might work with some of the UNIX emulations (cygwin, mingw, wsl, etc.)

Not sure what the oldest working Linux version would be. However, NixOS has been around since 2003, so maybe quite old.

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Nullabillity 2748 days ago
> Does it work on macOS or Windows yet?

It runs fine on macOS. It works on WSL if you disable SQLite's write-ahead log (`echo "use-sqlite-wal = false" > /etc/nix/nix.conf` before installing), but it's much slower than running it on native Linux.

> What's the oldest Linux distro upon which it will run?

It brings its own libraries, so the primary question would be what kernel you use. I haven't verified any specific version, but you'll probably be fine. You might need to disable sandboxing though, since that makes pretty elaborate use of the various namespace systems.

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