31K views · Oct 25, 2021 · 9:03 · 1 HN recommender · 5 mentions · discussed 2022–2024
Mitchell Hashimoto walks through his setup for running a NixOS virtual machine on a Mac as his development environment, with a config repo on GitHub.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN points to it as a practical reference for the Linux-VM-on-Mac workflow and as an entry point to NixOS.
“My general setup mirrors this[1] pretty closely”HN comment, 2022
“Just run Linux in a VM! It's my preferred workflow nowadays.”
Shows running NixOS in a VM on a Mac as dev workflow.
Just run Linux in a VM! It's my preferred workflow nowadays. See: link this video Only real limitations are lack of ML because no server/desktop-grade GPU and some missing ARM-based docker containers. But the latter is slowly being resolved and the former isn't gonna happen on a laptop anyways.
“I got interested in NixOS after watching”
Sparked interest in NixOS.
I got interested in NixOS after watching link and this video I use fedora since long time and so far is quite stable without any non-sense
“Inspired by Mitchell Hashimoto's VMWare setup[0].”
Inspired NixOS VM setup on Mac.
3 of the 4 items that the author mentioned can be solved with using NixOS inside a VM on your mac :) Inspired by Mitchell Hashimoto's VMWare setup[0]. I setup my own computer in such a way, I now have the best of both worlds. Developing on a linux machine, where I can control everything if I wanted (down to the OS) and the ease of Notes/iMessages whenever I need it. Window management is a pita because of internal APIs and the fact that Apple doesn't cater to people that actually care about these tools. Check out Yabai[1] which btw requires you to disable SIP (System Integrity Protection) if you want to use its full potential. Instead you can run NixOS and choose your favourite window/tiling manager (i3). Package manager: I still run Nix but I am not that happy with it. Either I need to spend some more time or look for an alternative. One of the problems is the ability to easily pin older versions. [0] - this video [1] - link
“My general setup mirrors this[1] pretty closely”
Setup walkthrough the commenter's own workflow closely mirrors.
My general setup mirrors this[1] pretty closely, though of course on Windows I can just use WSL2. [1]: this video
“Similar to hashicorp founder setup found here”
Example of a NixOS VM-on-Mac development setup.
Personally been working on replacing “brew” with “nix” for package management. Eventually using VMs spun up with qemu to emulate nixOS on my Mac for primary dev environment. Similar to hashicorp founder setup found here (except hoping to not use “parallels or vm ware fusion”: this video
