NixOS VM on Mac Setup on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2022–2024.
tutorial · intermediate · dated
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.
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”
5 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
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.
in “Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?” · View on HN
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
in “My 2024 Setup” · View on HN
My general setup mirrors this[1] pretty closely, though of course on Windows I can just use WSL2. [1]: ▶ this video
in “LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds” · View on HN
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]
in “Impressions from a first-time Mac user” · View on HN
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
in “Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu” · View on HN