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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Ah! Finally I see a way to try nix (the package manager) on my existing installation without it requiring access to the root directory and other such stuff!

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I don't recommend using Nix inside PRoot unless this is your only option (e.g.: Android, since there are no user namespaces). The reason for that is that Nix is syscall heavy and using it in PRoot will be slow, really slow.

As someone said, the wiki [1] has some interesting options. From the options I used nix-user-chroot [2] with great success, and while the tool is unmaintained it should still work. It uses Linux's user namespaces instead of intercepting syscalls, and this makes the performance pretty much identical to native.

If you want more control like PRoot offers, I recommend bubblewrap instead [2].

Another option undocumented is to just grab a recent nix binary somewhere and run. It will automatically create the Nix store inside `$HOME/.local/share/nix` (if I am not mistaken) and use user namespaces to mount to it. However the last time I tried this didn't work well for a few things (e.g.: Home-Manager), so in general I still think nix-user-chroot is a better choice.

[1]: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Nix_Installation_Guide, linking to the official one

[2]: https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap

[3]: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Nix_Installation_Guide#nix-user-...

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Installation_Guide discusses that a bit more (also other solutions)

Unrelated, but does anyone know what's the deal between wiki.nixos.org and nixos.wiki? The former appears to be actually functional, but the latter ranks much higher in search engines and seems to be incorrectly treated by them as the primary source.

Because nixos.wiki was the primary source, until very recently. Then, wiki.nixos.org was introduced, and mass edits were made (without the owner of nixos.wiki being ok with that) trying to redirect people from nixos.wiki to wiki.nixos.org, and now both co-exist.

Reminds me a bit the archlinux.fr vs wiki.archlinux.org fr wiki situation from 10 years ago.

nixos.wiki was the primary wiki before NixOS really had an official one. Now there is the official wiki.nixos.org and the NixOS foundation asked the nixos.wiki maintainer to cooperate on the new wiki but they refused. Now there are multiple problems[1] with nixos.wiki and the maintainer in unresponsive so although unfortunately it's ranked higher in search results, in my experience you'll get better information on the official wiki.

[1] https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/FAQ#Why_is_there_a_new_wiki?_Wha...?

Ah, too bad the maintainer is unresponsive. If they don't plan to work on it, they'd do a huge service to community by adding permanent redirects to wiki.nixos.org and maybe canonical links.

I went to see what the problems were for myself. While I wouldn't run my own sure that way, I was expecting something more serious to justify a migration. I think having the primary wiki within the project is a good idea generally. It does feel like the problems below are just minor annoyances though.

---

Why is there a new wiki? What is with nixos.wiki?

The old wiki at nixos.wiki has several problems:

    Many components (mediawiki, php, icu) are severely outdated.
        MediaWiki 1.29 (EOL 2018), now 1.35 (EOL 2023-12)
        PHP 7.3.33 (EOL 2021-12)
        ICU 64.2
    Cloudflare DDOS protection makes wiki edits fail sometimes.
    There is no WYSIWYG editor.
    The wiki infrastructure, which was supposed to be made public after launch, never ended-up being made public

  Many components (mediawiki, php, icu) are severely outdated.

  The wiki infrastructure, which was supposed to be made public after launch, never ended-up being made public

I suspect both of these are a bigger deal to the Nix community than perhaps to the average group.

Nix can do that natively with the --store option. But I'd recommend installing it normally if you do have access to / on your system though. Nix itself doesn't litter files all over the filesystem and can be uninstalled cleanly.

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