Building the Ladder

At NixCon 2022, flox Lead Engineer Tom Bereknyei (@tomberek) presented the mission behind flox. It was an important moment for us to share with the Nix community what we see as the problems we can solve, and how we intend to go about solving them.

From personal experience, we've seen the hurdles of Nix adoption, from the first steps of installing Nix, to understanding the usage patterns of profiles vs environments vs shells, to navigating the myriad deployment tools at our disposal. Yet the Nix story is worth telling, and the world needs to hear it, which is why we're invested in sharing it.

The 4 C's

"Adoption at larger scale cannot be solved with a single feature". Nix gives us the tools to tell an end-to-end story in the development lifecycle, and we are focused on telling that story. We're tackling this via several efforts:

• native signed installers for your platform
• the Catalog: nixpkgs with no cache misses and semantic versioning

• declarative profiles: an intuitive interface to composable, shareable developer environments

• curated templates and investing further in lang2nix efforts
• a "publish" command to publish your artifacts anywhere

• containerize: provide escape hatches to run artifacts in any environment

We define our approach as 4 C's: Community, Convenience, Collaboration, and Control. We will continue to actively contribute and support the community in pushing the Nix vision to its full potential. Our goal is to provide access to Nix’s superpowers via a convenient, intuitive toolset, enabling new levels of collaboration between and across teams, and enterprise-grade control over one's tools. This way we can provide a path for people to adopt and leverage Nix to whatever extent they want, without fear or lock-in.

We're incredibly excited about what we're building and can't wait to get it in your hands.

Check out Tom's full talk here.

Thank you NixCon! See you next year!

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About the author:

Julien Urraca, Developer Relations