[traverseda]

I don't think nix is that hard for this particular use case. Installing nix on other distros is pretty easy, and once it's installed you just do something like this

    #! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
    #! nix-shell -i bash -p imagemagick cowsay

    # scale image by 50%
    convert "$1" -scale 50% "$1.s50.jpg" &&
    cowsay "done $1.q50.jpg"

Sure all of nixos and packaging for nix is a challenge, but just using it for a shell script is not too bad

[caspar]

Last time I checked,[0] this works great - as long as you don't particularly care which specific versions of imagemagick or cowsay you want.

If you do care, then welcome to learning about niv, flakes, etc.

[0]: admittedly 3 years ago or so.

[loremm]

This is a hack but I still found it helpful. If you do want to force a certain version, without worrying about flakes [1] this can be your bash shebang, with similar for nix configuration.nix or nix-shell interactive. It just tells nix to use a specific git hash for it's base instead of whatever your normal channel is.

For my use case, most things I don't mind tracking mainline, but some things I want to fix (chromium is very large, python changes a lot, or some version broke things)

```

#! nix-shell -i bash -p "cowsay" '(import (fetchTarball { url="https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/eb090f7b923b1226e8b..."; sha256 = "15iglsr7h3s435a04313xddah8vds815i9lajcc923s4yl54aj4j";}) {}).python3'

```

[1] flakes really aren't bad either, especially if you think about it as just doing above, but automatically

[Imustaskforhelp]

I will say this with a whole heart. My arch linux broke and I wanted to try out nix.

The most shocking part about nix is the nix-shell (I know I can use it in other distros but hear me out once), its literally so cool to install projects for one off.

Want to record a desktop? Its one of those tasks that for me I do just quite infrequently and I don't like how in arch, I had to update my system with obs as a dependency always or I had to uninstall it. Ephemerality was a concept that I was looking for before nix since I always like to try out new software/keep my home system kind of minimalist-ish Cool. nix-shell -p obs-studio & obs and you got this.

honestly, I like a lot of things about nix tbh. I still haven't gone too much into the flake sides of things and just use it imperatively sadly but I found out that nix builds are sandboxed so I found a unique idea of using it as a sandbox to run code on reddit and I think I am going to do something cool with it. (building something like codapi , codapi's creator is kinda cool if you are reading this mate, I'd love talking to ya)

And I personally almost feel as if some software could truly be made plug n play (like imagine hetzner having nix os machines (currently I have heard that its support is finnicky) but then somehow a way to get hetzner nix os machines and then I almost feel as if we can get something really really close to digital ocean droplets/ plug n play without any isolation that docker provides because I guess docker has its own usecases but I almost feel as if managing docker stuff is kinda harder than nix stuff but feel free to correct me as I am just saying what I am feelin using nix.

I also wish if something like functional lua (does fxn lua exist??) -> nix transpiler because I'd like to write lua instead of nix to manage my system but I guess nix is fine too!

[Hetzner_OL]

Hi there, Since you mentioned Hetzner, I thought I would respond here. While we do not have NixOS as one of our standard images for our cloud products, it is part of our ISO library. Customers can install it manually. To do this, create a cloud server, click on it, and then on the "ISO" in the menu, and then look for it listed alphabetically. --Katie

[Imustaskforhelp]

Hey hetzner. I am just a 16 year old boy (technically I am turning 17 on 2nd july haha but I want nothing from ya haha) who has heard great things about your service while being affordable but never have tried them because I guess I just don't have a credit card/I guess I am a really frugal person at this moment haha. I was just reading one of your own documents if I feel correct and it said that the support isn't the best(but I guess I was wrong)

I guess I will try out nix on hetzner for sure one day. This is really cool!!! Thanks! I didn't expect you to respond. This is really really cool. You made my day to whoever responded with this. THANKS A LOT KATIE. LOTS OF LOVE TO HETZNER. MAY YOU BE THE WAY YOU ARE, SINCE Y'ALL ARE PERFECT.

[Hetzner_OL]

Hi again, I'm happy that I made your day! You seem pretty easy to please if that is all it takes. Keep in mind that customers must be 18 years old. I believe that is a legal requirement here in Germany, where we are based. Until then, if you're a fan, maybe you'd enjoy seeing what we're up to. We're on YouTube, reddit, Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, and X. --Katie

[loremm]

and I've been using nixos on hetzner, nothing crazy but it's always worked great :-). A nice combination with terraform

[Purplish9893]

If you think nix-shell is cool, try out comma. https://github.com/nix-community/comma

When there's some random little utility I need I don't always bother to install it. It's just `, weirdlittleutil`.