You're right cost is an issue, that's why Cloudy Pad is mostly suitable for occasional players (up to 30h or 40h / months) in which case it's still cost efficient to use such Cloud providers.
> more or less identical and cost far far less.
I wish it would, for I have tried: the problem is GPU availability which is often low or highly elastic. Considering data are persisted in a given region, there's high chance your RTX 4090 will be unavailable when you want it.
These platforms are great for AI and inference since you can easily hop onto another GPU type and it's not too much an issue if a certain GPU type is not available at a given time. Not so much for gaming purpose :(
Major Cloud providers have much more availability on their infra.
From what I gather it's exactly this in reverse: they already were a consulting company providing development environment to teams as part of their package, and Flox is an internal tool they open-sourced. (interpreted from what I read on their about page: https://flox.dev/about/)
I agree. Plain Nix is very complex but highly configurable and allow very complex use case, whereas Flox / devenv are much easier to setup but hide certain Nix features (which are probably not needed in most dev environments anyway, so it's totally worth it given the simpler interface)
Indeed. I find it hard to advocate for Nix at DayJob because it’s so fully loaded as a term. We are discussing the capabilities of Nix and are able to understand that the piece of Nix we are referring to is but one small piece of everything that is offered under the Nix umbrella. Nix is
- a package manager for system packages
- a methodology to declaratively manage your local environment
- a methodology to declaratively manage your entire machine
- a deterministic build tool
- an entire operating system
We know we are really only talking about the first two in this conversation but for some random engineer in your org who has no idea what Nix is it’s extremely easy to get caught in a rabbit hole of the other bullet points even though they are not relevant at all to this conversation. So I think it’s generally pretty risky to even mention Nix as an option because it has so many nerd traps that ultimately end up as distractions to do what you are trying to do. So I absolutely see the value in toolchains like this that try to hide that away but still reap the benefits of the ecosystem.
Wouldn't have said better, devenv and Flox are indeed similar and both uses Nix packages. We can say they are different frontends to the same set of packages, with slightly different features.
I've just tried both `devenv` and `flox`, and the latter had two related niceties:
- Direnv wants to put its config inside the root of a git repo, which makes it hard to ignore. Flox's config is all in a `.flox` directory, so I could `echo * >> .flox/.gitignore` in any repo without changing the repo's gitignore.
OTOH, `flox` was a bit harder to install in an existing nix setup and requires trusting their cache, at least if I wanted to do a cached install. You can follow the instructions in https://flox.dev/docs/install-flox/#__tabbed_1_6, or you could add yourself to Nix's "trusted users" (which makes sense only if you're the only user on the computer using Nix). See also https://github.com/flox/flox/issues/1179.
The site itself is not down but every search I did recently are greeted with _Sorry, we ran into an error displaying these results. Click here to try again._
It seems others have the same issue as well considering downdetector data.
> more or less identical and cost far far less.
I wish it would, for I have tried: the problem is GPU availability which is often low or highly elastic. Considering data are persisted in a given region, there's high chance your RTX 4090 will be unavailable when you want it.
These platforms are great for AI and inference since you can easily hop onto another GPU type and it's not too much an issue if a certain GPU type is not available at a given time. Not so much for gaming purpose :(
Major Cloud providers have much more availability on their infra.
> Check this out; https://github.com/selkies-project/selkies
Thanks, this is one of the project I had in mind beside Wolf and Sunshine but haven't gone as far. A good reminder to try it out again :)