Hey from Berlin! I'm Ron one of the founders at Flox and also board member of the NixOS Foundation. Just noticed folks are talking here and that's super exciting! We are all in the midst of the yearly NixCon so apologies if I'm slow to respond or my answers are a bit shorter. Definitely happy to dig deeper!
I saw your question and actually wanted to share the response I shared a few months ago, happy to unpack or talk about any of it as well.
This is from our original 1.0 announcement here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692801) -> bringing forward what you saw today for free and open source, was a major part of why I started Flox, with much more to come into it. What we released today will be free forever (both the open source client and the FloxHub services for sharing environments). We plan on expanding the offering to include a more robust private software catalogs that layers on top of the OOTB Flox Catalog that ships with Flox. If you are interested in publishing your output or need revised versions of open source packages in Flox then it'll be very easy to have your own catalog to compliment the always-free Flox Catalog that Flox ships with today. Beyond that, we are focused on a number of services that help bring Nix's build to the enterprise. Over time we intend to sell a solution to enterprises - through subscriptions and services - so they can more effectively manage expansive and fragmented software supply chains. As part of developing custom tooling for enterprises, we think it's reasonable for them to participate in funding for that work.
There's a bunch of tutorials out there now, but what's the main case you're trying to solve for? Just an easy dev environment?
There's an ecosystem out there that ease up the entry for Nix and also nix.dev does a great job as part of documentation efforts inside of the community.
Hi, thanks for your reply! Yeah I was thinking about something easier for developement. Currently I use docker for most of my pipeline. But if it is possible, I would want to try something else more flexible.
Docker has dockerfile and all but even in 2024 I still have to compile and build stuff inside docker and then run 'docker commit' because building package with Nvidia gpu checking during 'docker build' usually fail for me.
And maybe something free me from the curse of distro. Previously I tried to run omniverse with isaac lab in my pc. Fedora, ubuntu 24.04 all failed. Only ubuntu 22.04 works. Distrobox actually didn't solve that case for me. And Omniverse docker image from nvidia doesn't support GUI. So I have to reinstall ubuntu 22.04 to use it. But currently the gnome is glitching with ubuntu 22.04 and I have to alt+f2 and type r to reset it frequently. I am just too tired to do another reset so I am here venting and looking for something more flexible.
I love this. I believe I might have even interfaced with your team around that time. I was leading Facebook's (now Meta) Developer Products team and we were building against super similar areas internally.
We ran back then a similar project that I coined "Developer On-Demand" to tackle that same problem space. It's also what eventually lead me to find the magics of Nix and then build Flox.
I also agree with a lot of what was shared in other comments, while the problems we tackled at large orgs such as Facebook, Shopify, Uber, Google (to name a few teams I remember working with) and obviously also Stripe, certain areas of the pain are 100% universal regardless of team size.
On the Flox side, we're trying to help with a few of them today and many more hopefully in the soon future, very open for thoughts! Things like - simple to use Nix for each of your projects + keep deps and config up to date across everyones Macbooks and Linux boxes, etc -- even if you don't have a full AWS team and Language Server team ready to support.
While I personally don't love developing at all times within a container. When I need to, I've found the flow of setting up with Nix and then containerizing to be the most ideal today. Is there something new recently that folks are using?
(I'm also a biased person as I'm a Nix person at heart)
We were building something very similar to this in collaboration with the VSCode teams a while back at Meta. The goal was to get development on demand via hooking into some beefy linux server farm shile having VSCode stay as the local experience. Though one of the problems even back then was similar to what you are mentioning. It did however remove all last mile network reliance during lockdown which was a plus.
Ron from flox.dev here, the note brought a lot of smiles across the team. We've been working on this for a while now and would love to hear if there is anything we can prioritize or do to keep making it better.
I’m glad to hear it! I’ve been grappling with how to package something I’m calling “HYPER // MODERN” (which I can talk about if you’re curious) and we’re pretty locked-in on flox at this point, it had been a combination of flakes and Homebrew and flox is just a better time.
If you drop me an email at b7r6@b7r6.net (I also just joined your slack) I’d love to give my feedback on this or that nitpick.
But overall, well done friends, very very nice stuff.
Thanks for asking! This is definitely a deeper lets get beers convo when you're in the bay! But - Have you ever seen the Microservices video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
I was leading the developer products team at Facebook back then and started a project around injecting remote capabilities into local dev. Short of it was that thousands of developers were waiting 45 minutes for cold builds...
Part of the initial steps for the project was to map out the entire SDLC (so we can get a sense of what parts of the toolchains we need to rebuild), that's where that video above comes into mind if you look at that whiteboard towards the end... Visualizing how complex we've made it is what got me into the headspace of - this can't actually be how we go about this.
Appreciate the call out. Regarding pricing, bringing forward what you saw today for free and open source, was a major part of why I started Flox, with much more to come into it.
What we released today will be free forever (both the open source client and the FloxHub services for sharing environments). We plan on expanding the offering to include a more robust private software catalogs that layers on top of the OOTB Flox Catalog that ships with Flox. If you are interested in publishing your output or need revised versions of open source packages in Flox then it'll be very easy to have your own catalog to compliment the always-free Flox Catalog that Flox ships with today. Beyond that, we are focused on a number of services that help bring Nix's build to the enterprise.
Over time we intend to sell a solution to enterprises - through subscriptions and services - so they can more effectively manage expansive and fragmented software supply chains. As part of developing custom tooling for enterprises, we think it's reasonable for them to participate in funding for that work.
Good luck! My experience of Nix, and similar "robust engineering" solutions like Bazel is that there are a handful of people that get it, and see the benefits. But there are hoards more that think you should just write hacky shell scripts and bugs don't really matter anyway.
There are also the people who get it and see the benefits, but don't want to put up with the work required to have your system or environment managed with Nix. If this tool simplifies things, it could get traction.
we will always allow the CLI to stand alone for a local developer or CI runner. the service side of Flox is for those who want a faster performance, easy sharing, or eventually enterprise control. so while the CLI can use the closed service it's purely optional (and will always be optional)
I saw your question and actually wanted to share the response I shared a few months ago, happy to unpack or talk about any of it as well.
This is from our original 1.0 announcement here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692801) -> bringing forward what you saw today for free and open source, was a major part of why I started Flox, with much more to come into it. What we released today will be free forever (both the open source client and the FloxHub services for sharing environments). We plan on expanding the offering to include a more robust private software catalogs that layers on top of the OOTB Flox Catalog that ships with Flox. If you are interested in publishing your output or need revised versions of open source packages in Flox then it'll be very easy to have your own catalog to compliment the always-free Flox Catalog that Flox ships with today. Beyond that, we are focused on a number of services that help bring Nix's build to the enterprise. Over time we intend to sell a solution to enterprises - through subscriptions and services - so they can more effectively manage expansive and fragmented software supply chains. As part of developing custom tooling for enterprises, we think it's reasonable for them to participate in funding for that work.