a) Allowing user to choose the location of the nix folder (for example $HOME/.nix) by using bwrap or proot
b) Same binary for Win/Linux/OSX on x86_64 (Also see https://ahgamut.github.io/2022/07/27/ape-rust-example/)
I've seen some of those changes from DavHau before, they're good! We've also been looking at the statically built version of Nix which is good for "single user" / home-directory-managed installs of Nix. It's a great idea and simplifies the onboarding a good bit. And, it adds some extra behavior which is a little weird. It also doesn't work on macOS, and we're hoping to nail down a (mostly...) consistent experience across the three.
No, it can't be used that way on NixOS, but we could put something out that sets up a similar experience on NixOS! Good idea!
re: NixOS, not sure exactly what this entails, but i'd love a standardized approach to getting my Nix Flakes onto a NixOS system.
Right now i have this adhoc bootstrap process and it feels a bit silly. I get it's slightly different to getting Nix itself installed, BUT, it's also somewhat related from a user point of view. It would be interesting to see something handle this out of the box.
I wonder if you took a look at some of the modifications done by portable-nix (https://github.com/DavHau/nix-portable), most important ones being:
And then, somewhat unrelated: