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NixOS VM on Mac Setup

Name: NixOS VM on Mac Setup
Description: 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.

Mitchell Hashimoto

Tutorials

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1 HN user recommended this tutorial1 month2022–2024 score 1

Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN points to it as a practical reference for the Linux-VM-on-Mac workflow and as an entry point to NixOS.

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.

“My general setup mirrors this[1] pretty closely” (HN, 2022)

1 recommendations · 4 citations · Tutorials · intermediate · partly dated

Linux & open-source ecosystems Operating systems & kernels Testing, debugging & developer tools Tutorials Systems, Networks & Security

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@indiv0 Apr 2022 Recommends

on HN thread Ask HN: What’s a good laptop for software development at around $2k?

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.

Shows running NixOS in a VM on a Mac as dev workflow.

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Citations, criticism and jokes

@alekun Mar 2022 Cites it

on HN thread Firefox now only available via snap on Ubuntu

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

Sparked interest in NixOS.

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@xisthesqrtof9 Apr 2022 Cites it

on HN thread Impressions from a first-time Mac user

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]

Inspired NixOS VM setup on Mac.

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@bsnnkv Nov 2022 Cites it

on HN thread LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

My general setup mirrors this[1] pretty closely, though of course on Windows I can just use WSL2. [1]: [this video]

Setup walkthrough the commenter's own workflow closely mirrors.

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@xyst Mar 2024 Cites it

on HN thread My 2024 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]

Example of a NixOS VM-on-Mac development setup.

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