What does HackerNews think of nix-on-droid?

There's a fork of Termux that uses Nix for package management on F-Droid, and the R environment on it seems to work fine. Just tested it by booting up the REPL.

https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid

I doubt your setup needed recompiling the Nix binary itself at any point. Even I did that more out of love of adventure than for any practical reasons, it’s just that the scars are still there. (Still less than those from the time when the LibreOffice build was broken on Hydra and a routine system update jumped right into trying to perform it locally, even if that indeed was what I technically asked for...)

And you know what, the long evaluation thing might just be a bug. Or at least I don’t see any other reason why (e.g.) `nix-shell -p yt-dlp` works reasonably fast on my Nix-on-Droid[1] installation but `nix shell nixpkgs#yt-dlp` takes minutes.

[1] https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid

These are general purpose computers. It ought to be possible to access their compute in ways that are not influenced by their manufacturer.

For instance, even though I hate google with a passion, I got this $150 android tablet and I've been using https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid to access pretty much the same tools that I use on my Linux desktop. I have the same setup on my Android phone.

I was at the university library the other day, surrounded by windows machines (I'm no fan of Microsoft either), and I wanted a big screen and keyboard, so I ran https://github.com/yudai/gotty on my phone and used a browser on the windows box to access the nix-enabled shell on my phone, which had everything I need, configured how I like it.

Other times I'll use a google cloud shell, clone my nix config, and have the same experience there.

Sure, I'm relying on Google and Microsoft in some capacity here and there, but I've reduced my reliance on software that they wrote to the point where they're pretty much just a dumb pipe between me and the hardware. They might be able to break my workflow, but that's about the limit of their control.

Unlike Apple, they'd rather attempt to control me in other ways so they don't break my workflow. They're ok with failing a certain percentage of the time, after all they're still getting my money. Apple doesn't seem to be able to let go to that degree.

In case you want the same Termux experience but also the huge nix packages collection - check out https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid