I've recently been experimenting with nix generators. It's nice.

What's the most pleasant way to develop and build nix images if your dev env is a regular Linux distro without nix installed?

So far the least bad seems to be running Nixos in a VM with VS Code remote via SSH and scp'ing images around. At least quickemu makes getting the VM pleasant. But VMs are cumbersome.

Docker would be great, but nix from the official Docker container doesn't seem to like running as non-root, which means you can't use volume mounts for the code and change the user ID so that the file permissions are right from inside the container.