Thomas Woolford
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twoolie.bsky.social
Thomas Woolford
@twoolie.bsky.social
I'm a generalist who enjoys a challenge, and I'm way too fascinated by build systems. In my free time I play VR games and ride bikes with my son.

Professional Software Engineer.
Unprofessional Mechx Engineer.

nobot
November 19, 2025 at 10:29 AM
Since your original comment was about NixOS not giving you access to language-specific package managers, this is likely not what you're looking for.
October 29, 2025 at 7:12 AM
AFAIK, steam-run bubblewraps a binary in a namespace that emulates the filesystem layout and set of libraries steam expects to see on a debian-like system.

I recommend it if you are grabbing a random binary off a GitHub release and want to run it "safely". Not for dev work, or running a PM.
October 29, 2025 at 7:11 AM
Oh, yeah it's great for setting up the system for running random binaries, not so ergonomic for on-the fly changes for getting random python packages working.

This is where I feel devenv really shines. It's easy to quickly iterate when trying new packages, and you can share the result to your team.
October 29, 2025 at 4:48 AM
nix-ld will require writing a shell.nix that brings shared libs into the LD_PATH.

If you're looking for an easier intro, give devenv a go. It uses the NixOS module system under the hood, comes with support for your fav tools, is cross platform and just plain convenient.
October 29, 2025 at 3:42 AM
Perfect for we who are mentally challenged enough to tackle it.
October 27, 2025 at 10:58 AM
This is excellent though
October 27, 2025 at 9:33 AM
Same, NixOS on my framework EDC, and on my old X1 carbon repurposed into a server.

I do miss the Trackpoint™ on the X1.
October 27, 2025 at 9:19 AM
You can add whatever you want on top, including alternate package managers, virtual environments and devcontainers.

Yes, it's sometimes inconvenient to teach third party packages not to use hard-coded paths to system libraries, but tools like nixld make this pretty easy tbh.
October 27, 2025 at 6:11 AM
Absolute bullshit, you can use poetry, hatch, bun, npm, cargo, NuGet, hex, etc on nixos. NixOS literally only provides the OS.

NixOS gives your users *more* flexibility because they can install their tools of choice without needing root privileges.
October 27, 2025 at 6:09 AM
Compared to Windows 11 where the base OS is 27Gb, I think 9.8 for a full OS, office and development suite is pretty svelte!
October 27, 2025 at 6:02 AM
Oof, the curse of automated testing. The one thing never tested is "what happens if I just leave this thing paused for more than 30 seconds". Because who wants to sit and wait for tests that way for nothing to happen?
October 20, 2025 at 6:21 AM
Run a memtest on it. If only a segment of memory is bad, you can mask it off at boot.
October 19, 2025 at 7:41 AM
PR: Replace all ugly single commas (,) with objectively fancy double commas(„).
October 19, 2025 at 5:05 AM
Oh god, I hope not.

Can you imagine the NixOS community forced to actually support previous releases?

RHEL for all its flaws does fund a pretty big engineering org. They put a lot of work into the kernel, GNOME, and cloud stacks like open shift.
August 13, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Framework ftw. I struggled to get it working on my old X1 carbon, turns out Lenovo's EFI implementation is just broken...
August 6, 2025 at 3:00 AM
github.com
July 18, 2025 at 12:10 PM