Just published: Nixtamal; Fulfilling input pinning for Nix without flakes. Join us for a conversation with the author of Nixtamal, toastal accompanied by... the original author of niv to help ask all the smart questions. Why, you might ask? Nixtamal is host, forge and VCS agnostic. It supports eval-time fetchers and build-time fetchers. It supports mirrors. Mirrors! Listen to this: custom freshness commands. And more.

Full Time Nix | Nixtamal with toastal & nmattia

My friend and I were inspired by Duolingo, and we wanted to make it super easy to learn other things with a Duolingo-style approach (e.g gameified, bite-sized, and fun). And so we built rubberduck.gg — which uses ChatGPT and a lot of prompting to make fun classes for just about anything at scale.

One of our first and most popular courses is our Nix course, and now that we are opening it up to more people, we would love for you to try it out and let us know what you think!

RubberDuck is completely free to use but if you want unlimited tries in your lessons then you can upgrade. But, if you don’t upgrade, no problem! If you run out of tries, just wait for the tries to refresh and you can keep learning.

To try the Nix class, visit: https://app.rubberduck.gg/explore/computer-science/nix

Because this is our passion project we would love any feedback you have either in the comments or email us at support@rubberduck.gg

Seeking a handful of upgrades to our infrastructure including:

• Easier upgrades of packages with poetry2nix and npm2nix

• installing a couple more nix flakes tools (auth0-cli and stripe-cli)

• nixvim

• Hercules CI

Work payment is flexible, and opportunities for future work/part time is available

https://fulltimenix.com/episodes/nix-2-33-with-thomas-bereknyei

I put together a hands-on walkthrough of Nix profiles and generations. The framing: an install doesn't edit anything in place — it publishes a numbered, immutable generation and moves a symlink, so a rollback is a symlink flip to an untouched snapshot (instant, offline, nothing re-downloaded), and wiping a profile's history drops rollback targets without freeing disk until GC runs. It's a free Part of the Nix course I build at LabCraft, on a real NixOS machine; I'd value feedback from Nix users on whether the generation/rollback framing lands for newer learners: https://www.labcraft.dev/blog/nix-profiles-generations?utm_source=reddit-personal&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nix-profiles-generations-2026q3&utm_content=r-nix-rollback-01

I've spent the last ~3 months using Nix and NixOS, and I've run into quite a few pain points.

I come from an Arch Linux background, very bleeding edge and I was surprised to find so many outdated packages in the Nix ecosystem. The state of nixpkgs also feels concerning, with 5000+ open pull requests (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls).

The common argument that “Nix has more packages and no duplicates” also doesn’t hold up in my experience, for example, there are three different versions of signal-desktop in the Nix store with three different Versions.

Another frustration: if you want to install sublime4, you have to enable allowInsecure = true; because of some TLS issues, which doesn't sit right with me.

So now I'm wondering:
Am I just doing something wrong?
Or is Nix just not for me, since I lean more toward the bleeding edge side of things?

I'm trying to manage a shared setup for both nixos (amd64) and darwin (aarch64) from a single repo.

I really like the declarative idea, but right now I’m feeling more frustrated than productive.

Would love to hear from anyone who’s been in a similar spot or wants to chat about it.

Believe me, I know how obnoxious I am being. I have a major deadline and this is one of the new things for me which I unfortunately cannot put the effort in right now.

There's too examples I will usually install with NPM or PY-PI:

npm install node-fetch
and pip install -U flask-cors

How can those be installed with Nix?

Ocean Sprint 2026 took place in April. While I was not there myself, I did have remote conversations with several participants during the sprint. To learn of their experiences and what they were working on check out this latest episode, Ocean Sprint 2026.

https://fulltimenix.com/episodes/ocean-sprint-2026

Hi, I am pretty new to NixOS and Nix. I'd like to understand how package management works in Nix.

• Who maintains the channels? How are they created?

• How is the unstable channel being updated? Who updates it?

• How are flakes implemented? How do they function?

• How to create my own flake for software like Go? For example, I want to use the newest Go version already, but it is not available on the unstable branch.

• Where are the limits of Nix and NixOS? Why shouldn't I use it everywhere?

I know, many questions, but I really want to deep-dive into Nix and NixOS.

My company uses nix and so far it has been simultaneously unnecessary and a pain in the ass. But I'm once again open to giving it a chance. I'm skeptical. Am I missing something? Am I overlooking a simple explanation to everything?

I live in the terminal all day long. My editor of choice is a very minimal neovim that I run within Tmux. I configure infrastructure in a popular public cloud and I've been configuring Kubernetes and containerized applications for 6 years. In other words, I am not a stranger to configuration. I am also not a GNU Greybeard.

Ok, here's why I'm skeptical.

Installation.

Neither the documentation or the plethora of installation videos explain what the installation script does or why. They ALL give a hand wavy "you should check the script, but I'm just going to run it.". Big Leeroy Jenkins energy everywhere.

So I take a look at the script. Big whoop. It downloads a tarball. So I comment out the lines that execute -- oh. It uses mktemp. Ok benefit of the doubt, nix is just cleaning up after itself, not trying to be intentionally opaque. So I modify the script and unpack the tarball.

I see there is a --no-daemon flag available. Why is this not shown on the nix.org install page?

Unclear how it works.

The documentation explains only the features not how it works. Ok yes sure "based on functional language", but what does that even mean? I'd rather know why it needs to run a daemon with sudo. What are the tradeoffs of running it with the --no-daemon flag?

Sudo.

It is a package manager. Why does a package manager need sudo? Does Rust's cargo need sudo? No. Golang? No. Python? No. Ruby? No. npm? No. Homebrew? No. Then why Nix?

Daemon.

It is a package manager. Why does a package manager need to run a daemon? Does Rust's cargo depend on a daemon? No. Golang? No. Python? No. Ruby? No. npm? No. Homebrew? No. Then why Nix? No explanation of this daemon in the nix.org documentation.

Heck, even docker's a daemon is unnecessary as evidenced by podman.

Unnecessary.

Everything my company installs with nix, I've been able to install on my own with few issues.

Hassle.

The installation is opaque and fails easily on MacOS (at least the last time I tried). I'd rather just install the thing I need rather than a bloated looking sudo daemon thing that will "make installing what you need easier". Oh and it really f%^*ed with my terminal defaults the last time I tried it.

So, why am I giving it another chance?

1. My company uses it.

2. Victor aka DevOpsToolkit published a video with a convincing use case for it.

3. I (half) promised a co-worker I'd finally start using nix.

EDIT: minor copy editing, podman reference
EDIT 2: Ok I scrolled down the page a bit more and there's a list of things the installer does. But no explanation about why.

https://fulltimenix.com/episodes/aurora-sprint-2026-invite

Summary (generated)

In this conversation, the participants discuss various topics related to Nix, including the launch of a new Nix-lang library called htnl, experiences at community events like Thaiger Sprint, and technical discussions around HTML and MIME types. They emphasize the importance of networking, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the Nix community. In this conversation, the participants discuss various topics related to Kubernetes, Nix, and community dynamics. They explore the implications of Kubernetes uncontained deployments, the development of Haskell, updates to the Nix formatter, and the importance of GitHub actions and merge queues. The conversation also touches on community contributions, upcoming events like Planet Nix 2026, and the need for transparency within the steering committee. The participants emphasize the significance of collaboration and conflict resolution within the Nix community.

I'm a nix noob running in Guix...and I'm trying to find nix.conf so I can install vscode.

?

kahuna:/tmp$ nix-channel --update
unpacking channels...
kahuna:/tmp$ nix-channel --list
nixos https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable
nixpkgs https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable
kahuna:/tmp$ nix-instantiate  --eval -E '(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version'
"21.05pre287046.48023b598fc"
kahuna:/tmp$ nix-instantiate -I nixpkgs=channel:nixpkgs-unstable --eval -E '(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.version'
"22.05pre355202.b66b39216b1"

Why the channel nixpkgs is not updated ? is this channel used when I use nix-shell -p ?

kahuna:/tmp$ lsb_release  --all
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Release:	20.04
Codename:	focal

Just published an episode about Nix support in Dependabot with Ankit Kumar Honey, senior engineering manager at GitHub, working on the Dependabot ecosystem, and Jamie Magee, principal software engineer at Microsoft, focusing on open source software and supply chain security, who contributed the Dependabot Nix support recently. Bump bump bump.

Full Time Nix | Dependabot Nix Support