NixOS Crash Course

Join us for our monthly meetup! This month's speaker is Brayden Houston giving their talk: NixOS Crash Course. A quick overview of the Nix package manager, language, and NixOS distribution. The speaker will talk about some of the strengths and weaknesses of each part of the system and how to get started using Nix.

The speaker will start by explaining the differences between “Nix” the package manager, “Nix” the package repository, and Nix the operating system. They will walk through how to install the package manager on different systems like Linux and Mac. For the “full power” experience they will show how to install NixOS. In all these installs they will review how “Nix” can be used to create reproducible program and system configurations like web servers or desktop applications. They will also show how the Nix package manager can ad-hoc a temporary environment to install packages in and then tear them down to leave your system free of the typical unused binaries that clutter a system over time for all those odd one-off needs.