I’ve recently had a bit of a mishap with my macOS installation which has provided me with the opportunity to try out Asahi Linux. Not wanting to take too many chances at once, I chose to go with the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution.

While the experience has been quite positive overall, it has left me without my beloved Nix package manager. Since I tend to use a variety of programming languages, this has me relearning how each development environment works.

I had started to take for granted, just how useful local Nix flakes are. Now, instead of just entering the directory and waiting for a moment while direnv loads the Nix flake, I find myself keeping up various versions of Rust, Haskell, Go, Typst, and Zig globally on my machine.

Especially for rapidly changing languages like Zig, flakes pinning a specific version on a project-by-project basis is extremely useful!

This Blog

This blog is built with Hakyll, see also this for specifics. This means that the static site generator is defined in a site.hs file which is then compiled via your favorite Haskell toolchain into a site binary. site build then converts my Markdown files into HTML and arranges everything the way that I want it, ready to compress and upload it to sourcehut pages via hut.

Since you typically don’t need to make changes to the static site generator, all you really need is the site and hut executables in your path which is exactly what the flake exposes by default when you type nix shell.

Now, it’s been a few years since I did anything with Haskell, so I’m out of practice; which means, I had to figure out from scratch how to install the toolchain, why it wasn’t finding zlib even though it was installed (apparently, I was missing the development dependencies zlib-devel), and then install the site binary globally, as well as sudo dnf install hut.

You might wonder, is it really that painful to do these things? Especially, since the main pain comes only once upon first setup. Instead of installing site globally, could I not use direnv to manipulate the path so that it finds the local build? Or just run cabal run site build? Could this not be alleviated by having a setup script, that does most of this stuff for you, just like the flake.nix? And probably you’re right. But it is less convenient now that I’m used to Nix.

Typst

As for Typst it is available via Snap, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work. So, since I had a Rust toolchain for a different project anyway, I installed it via cargo install --locked typst-cli. This worked fine, once I had separately installed the openssl-devel dependencies.

In between the version I had pinned and the current one, it doesn’t seem like there were breaking changes. However, in rapidly developing languages, that is always a possibility; depending on the language, there may be ways of pinning specific versions, but that is not always the case. And either way, it is more convenient to have the same way of handling pinning across different projects.

Conclusion

Anyway, this is just me rambling because I hadn’t realized how much I have come to rely on Nix and the conveniences it provides for granted. Maybe I should try to put NixOS on this machine instead, but for now this seems like a good exercise.

I do dearly miss Nix, though.