nixos-shell is a small shell script written by Jörg Thalheim for Nix and #NixOS. What it does is very simple: It takes a machine configuration from your file, builds a VM with it and runs the VM directly in your terminal with sensible defaults.

I've got several systems to administrate at work. It's common that I have to access them through ssh or copy a file from one system to another. I love the Solaris automounter that's configured on /net by default, meaning that if you access /net/server1/nfsshare2/path/to/file you get exactly what you expect: the file. Now the automounter isn't exactly rocket science and it's easy to setup on a linux system, but I don't want to access everything through NFS and all the security issues that come with that. Luckily, #SSHFS is part of pretty much every linux distribution and the server just requires sftp, which is default on pretty much every system, as it's just a subsystem of the ssh daemon and the ssh daemon handles authentication.

So... time to finally add some nix content. This one is probably more along the lines of "did you know ... ?"

NOTE: This text describes how I set up #Hubzilla on #NixOS. As I'm no longer using Hubzilla, I've just copied this text over for archival purposes.

#NixOS is a linux distribution that has a very different approach compared to other distributions.

You do not change configuration files of applications. You just change the build instructions that the package manager Nix uses to build the system. On NixOS the full system is rebuilt everytime you want to change even a minor detail.