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Nonsense. You can run nix on basically any linux system (not just NixOS) and macOS. Not just theoretically, I'm doing both and am not running NixOS itself at all ATM. It's also the only sane way to build docker images. Since nix itself of course runs fine inside docker, I suspect you should be able to build a docker image on Windows that way, too, but I haven't tried.

Also, even if you come up with a forward facing solution and demonstrate it only on a particular domain you still, IMO, deserve most of the credit for solving the problem even if it takes others to translate it straightforwardly to other domains.




Nix only "works" in macOS, in the context of pretty UNIX, software development on macOS is usually something else.


I'm not sure I'm following. Isn't this argument applicable against Docker as well?


No, Docker on Windows can make use of Windows containers, and also interoperates with any kind of Windows or macOS application.


In what way does docker on macOS interoperate better with the rest of the system than a nix package? I'm pretty sure the answer is going to be "none" – you can build native, including UI apps with nix (not that I recommend throwing away xcode for your app store development and switching to nix). How do you do that with docker?

I'm less sure about windows, can you explain a bit more how you use docker containers for providing "native" windows stuff (as opposed to as a more lightweight linux VM replacement when developing something that you really want to deploy on linux)?


For example deploying IIS based applications, including some Windows services and COM libraries.


Thanks, I wasn't aware of this.


Out of curiosity, why are you using docker containers on windows? For emulate static linking or to provide network/process isolation (and does docker under windows provide "proper" i.e. secure isolation?) or something else entirely?


Configure a couple of application servers from scratch and manually configuring the services starts to get tiring.

Usually the traditional option would be to snapshot the VM right after the first successful install.

However stuff like Windows Nano now makes it interesting to start playing with containers on Windows.


> It's also the only sane way to build docker images.

That is definitely an exaggeration, considering the utility the industry leverages with plain Dockerfile's.

However, I am curious about the specifics that you are probably thinking of, if you'll elaborate.




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