* . *
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact
Thursday, September 18, 2025
Earth-News
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    REO to return for UI homecoming – The News-Gazette

    REO Gears Up to Ignite the Stage at UI Homecoming Celebration!

    Gen V Season 2: What is The Odessa Project? – yahoo.com

    Gen V Season 2: Unlocking the Secrets of The Odessa Project

    PENN Entertainment stock rating reiterated at Market Outperform by JMP – Investing.com

    PENN Entertainment Stock Rated a Market Outperformer by Experts

    Here’s how NJ’s once-vibrant nightclub scene was born and why it died – Bergen Record

    The Rise and Fall of New Jersey’s Once-Vibrant Nightclub Scene: What Happened?

    The Emmys are back: Viewership soars to highest numbers in 4 years – yahoo.com

    The Emmys Return with a Bang: Viewership Hits a 4-Year High

    From Spinal Tap II to Ed Sheeran : your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead – The Guardian

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    China says US TikTok deal a ‘win-win’, will review app’s technology and IP transfers – Reuters

    China Hails US TikTok Deal as a ‘Win-Win’ While Launching Review of App’s Technology and IP Transfers

    Bucking the Odds: Why Technology Companies Should Embrace Software Patents Today – Crowell & Moring LLP

    Bucking the Odds: Why Technology Companies Should Embrace Software Patents Today – Crowell & Moring LLP

    City IT presented Best of North Carolina Technology Award – RaleighNC.gov

    City IT Honored with Best of North Carolina Technology Award

    LELO Releases 2025 Futurist Report: Intergenerational Views on Relationships, Sex, and Technology – PR Newswire

    Exploring the Future: How Different Generations View Relationships, Sex, and Technology in 2025

    Will New Big Technology Engagements Reshape Innodata’s Growth Path? – Yahoo Finance

    Could New Major Tech Partnerships Propel Innodata to Unprecedented Growth?

    Unlocking AI Success: How People, Process, and Technology Form the Ultimate Triangle

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Entertainment
    REO to return for UI homecoming – The News-Gazette

    REO Gears Up to Ignite the Stage at UI Homecoming Celebration!

    Gen V Season 2: What is The Odessa Project? – yahoo.com

    Gen V Season 2: Unlocking the Secrets of The Odessa Project

    PENN Entertainment stock rating reiterated at Market Outperform by JMP – Investing.com

    PENN Entertainment Stock Rated a Market Outperformer by Experts

    Here’s how NJ’s once-vibrant nightclub scene was born and why it died – Bergen Record

    The Rise and Fall of New Jersey’s Once-Vibrant Nightclub Scene: What Happened?

    The Emmys are back: Viewership soars to highest numbers in 4 years – yahoo.com

    The Emmys Return with a Bang: Viewership Hits a 4-Year High

    From Spinal Tap II to Ed Sheeran : your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead – The Guardian

  • General
  • Health
  • News

    Cracking the Code: Why China’s Economic Challenges Aren’t Shaking Markets, Unlike America’s” – Bloomberg

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Trump’s Narrow Window to Spread the Truth About Harris

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    Israel-Gaza war live updates: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Iran, group says

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    PAP Boss to Niger Delta Youths, Stay Away from the Protest

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Court Restricts Protests In Lagos To Freedom, Peace Park

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Fans React to Jazz Jennings’ Inspiring Weight Loss Journey

    Trending Tags

    • Trump Inauguration
    • United Stated
    • White House
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
    China says US TikTok deal a ‘win-win’, will review app’s technology and IP transfers – Reuters

    China Hails US TikTok Deal as a ‘Win-Win’ While Launching Review of App’s Technology and IP Transfers

    Bucking the Odds: Why Technology Companies Should Embrace Software Patents Today – Crowell & Moring LLP

    Bucking the Odds: Why Technology Companies Should Embrace Software Patents Today – Crowell & Moring LLP

    City IT presented Best of North Carolina Technology Award – RaleighNC.gov

    City IT Honored with Best of North Carolina Technology Award

    LELO Releases 2025 Futurist Report: Intergenerational Views on Relationships, Sex, and Technology – PR Newswire

    Exploring the Future: How Different Generations View Relationships, Sex, and Technology in 2025

    Will New Big Technology Engagements Reshape Innodata’s Growth Path? – Yahoo Finance

    Could New Major Tech Partnerships Propel Innodata to Unprecedented Growth?

    Unlocking AI Success: How People, Process, and Technology Form the Ultimate Triangle

    Trending Tags

    • Nintendo Switch
    • CES 2017
    • Playstation 4 Pro
    • Mark Zuckerberg
No Result
View All Result
Earth-News
No Result
View All Result
Home Technology

Flox rocks the Nix box by conquering code chaos

March 23, 2024
in Technology
Flox rocks the Nix box by conquering code chaos
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

FOSDEM Flox aims to make Nix easier for newcomers, simplifying the job of installing identical development environments across Linux and macOS.

The Reg has looked at the Nix packaging system before, and the distro built with it a year later.

Nix is a radically different way to manage software on Unix-like OSes. It solves a lot of the problems caused by traditional methods, at the price of breaking a lot of assumptions and conventions. So since it was invented 21 years ago, the maintainers of more mainstream distros have invented Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, and others, all in efforts to fix much the same problems.

Tech startup Flox hopes to simplify and demystify Nix, and has just released version 1.0 of its eponymous product, which it calls a virtual environment and package manager all rolled into one.

Alongside the Flox command-line tool, the company offers FloxHub, an online repository for sharing and managing Flox environments. The name is a callback to GitHub, and the commands for dealing with it – uploading Flox environment definitions, managing them and downloading and deploying them – intentionally resemble Git and local package-management commands, which most Linux and Mac developers will already know well.

The Flox platform is based on Nix, and it draws components from the enormous Nixpkgs repository that contains more than 80,000 packages. The plan is to offer a simpler and more familiar interface than Nix itself, which uses its own pure functional language to manage software. The Reg FOSS desk spent some hours talking with Flox CEO Ron Efroni and CTO Michael Brantley at FOSDEM last year.

Pure functional programming has many strengths, such as declarative coding – where you specify what results you want, rather than devising the logic of how to work them out. (Think of SQL: SELECT name FROM students WHERE age>=12 – you don’t need to tell the database how to sort, search, or match; you just tell it what answers you’re looking for, and it does the hard part for you.) However, functional programming is such a different way of working from conventional imperative languages that many people find it very hard, to the extent that there are many jokes about it.

Flox wraps up all the complicated Nix stuff so that you just need to list the components you want, and any environment variables to set or commands to run, in a TOML format manifest. You don’t need to specify packages or versions or architectures or any of the nitty-gritty – it handles all that for you. Flox then installs or builds whatever is needed to create that exact environment on your target system – whatever that OS happens to be. Flox is currently available in both .deb and .rpm formats, for both x86-64 and ARM64 Linux and ARM64 macOS.

Linux kernel 4.14 gets a life extension, thanks to OpenELA

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

Fresh version of Windows user-friendly Zorin OS arrives to tempt the Linux-wary

As Flox developer Zach Mitchell puts it in his clear and not-too-technical introduction to Flox 1:

Flox abstracts away and replaces the functionality of any particular distribution’s package manager, or add-on ones such as Homebrew on macOS. It also replaces container management systems such as Docker, and for developers, add-on configuration management software such as Red Hat’s Ansible.

The company’s blog post about the release talks about qualities such as declarative specifications and reproducibility. These are things Flox inherits from its Nix underpinnings. Flox environments are reproducible, meaning you’ll get the exact same versions of the same components on each machine, regardless of the OS underneath or what it provides – including if those components have changed since the environment was created.

It’s declarative, which means that you just specify the result you want, rather than how to achieve it. You don’t need to specify checks for presence of existing components, or repositories or other software sources, or package-handling commands.

It’s composable, meaning that environments aren’t exclusive like container images. If you want both your front end and your back end environments at once, just activate both and Flox does the rest. The company also claims that its tools are faster than Nix itself, whose slow performance is one of the few complaints we often hear about it.

This vulture has never been a software developer, and so for us, most of this stuff is entirely theoretical. However, we’ve spoken with quite a few Nix users and their passionate enthusiasm always shines through. They readily concede that it’s hard to get to grips with, though, and that it can be slow and very resource-intensive.

Flox seems to confront that problem head on, and impose a simpler and much more familiar model on top of the very alien world of Nix, along with tooling for sharing manifests and environments. For this initial release, Flox is keeping things simple with just a CLI tool and an online repository … but the company has bigger and more ambitious plans for the future.

We will be watching with interest. ®

>>> Read full article>>>
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source : The Register – https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/23/flox_1_nix/

Tags: ConqueringRockstechnology
Previous Post

Russia’s Cozy Bear caught phishing German politicos with phony dinner invites

Next Post

Nigeria mourns victims of Moscow attack 

New approach improves right whale distribution models – EurekAlert!

Breakthrough Technique Boosts Precision in Mapping Right Whale Populations

September 18, 2025

Are Six-Figure Tech Careers Disappearing? Why Computer Science Graduates Are Struggling to Find Even Minimum Wage Jobs

September 18, 2025
Scientists reverse stroke damage with stem cells – ScienceDaily

Breakthrough Discovery: Scientists Successfully Reverse Stroke Damage with Stem Cells

September 18, 2025
New statewide SC lifestyle show ‘Palmetto Life Weekend’ to air on WMBF News – WMBF

Discover South Carolina’s Charm: New Lifestyle Show ‘Palmetto Life Weekend’ Premieres Statewide

September 18, 2025
China says US TikTok deal a ‘win-win’, will review app’s technology and IP transfers – Reuters

China Hails US TikTok Deal as a ‘Win-Win’ While Launching Review of App’s Technology and IP Transfers

September 18, 2025

Ireland Contracting Nightly Sports Call: Sept. 17, 2025 – CBS News

September 18, 2025
Trump Designates Antifa ‘Terror Organisation’ Days After Charlie Kirk Murder – NDTV

Trump Designates Antifa ‘Terror Organisation’ Days After Charlie Kirk Murder – NDTV

September 18, 2025
Study: UIS contributes nearly $1 billion to the Illinois economy – NPR Illinois

Study: UIS contributes nearly $1 billion to the Illinois economy – NPR Illinois

September 18, 2025
REO to return for UI homecoming – The News-Gazette

REO Gears Up to Ignite the Stage at UI Homecoming Celebration!

September 18, 2025
WATCH: Former CDC doctor says U.S. is on track to see uptick in preventable diseases under Kennedy – PBS

WATCH: Former CDC Doctor Warns of Rising Preventable Diseases in the U.S

September 18, 2025

Categories

Archives

September 2025
MTWTFSS
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930 
« Aug    
Earth-News.info

The Earth News is an independent English-language daily published Website from all around the World News

Browse by Category

  • Business (20,132)
  • Ecology (825)
  • Economy (844)
  • Entertainment (21,723)
  • General (17,103)
  • Health (9,889)
  • Lifestyle (859)
  • News (22,149)
  • People (849)
  • Politics (854)
  • Science (16,056)
  • Sports (21,344)
  • Technology (15,827)
  • World (828)

Recent News

New approach improves right whale distribution models – EurekAlert!

Breakthrough Technique Boosts Precision in Mapping Right Whale Populations

September 18, 2025

Are Six-Figure Tech Careers Disappearing? Why Computer Science Graduates Are Struggling to Find Even Minimum Wage Jobs

September 18, 2025
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

No Result
View All Result

© 2023 earth-news.info

Go to mobile version