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We were building something very similar to this in collaboration with the VSCode teams a while back at Meta. The goal was to get development on demand via hooking into some beefy linux server farm shile having VSCode stay as the local experience. Though one of the problems even back then was similar to what you are mentioning. It did however remove all last mile network reliance during lockdown which was a plus.

Ron from flox.dev here, the note brought a lot of smiles across the team. We've been working on this for a while now and would love to hear if there is anything we can prioritize or do to keep making it better.

Thanks for asking! This is definitely a deeper lets get beers convo when you're in the bay! But - Have you ever seen the Microservices video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

I was leading the developer products team at Facebook back then and started a project around injecting remote capabilities into local dev. Short of it was that thousands of developers were waiting 45 minutes for cold builds... Part of the initial steps for the project was to map out the entire SDLC (so we can get a sense of what parts of the toolchains we need to rebuild), that's where that video above comes into mind if you look at that whiteboard towards the end... Visualizing how complex we've made it is what got me into the headspace of - this can't actually be how we go about this.

Appreciate the call out. Regarding pricing, bringing forward what you saw today for free and open source, was a major part of why I started Flox, with much more to come into it. What we released today will be free forever (both the open source client and the FloxHub services for sharing environments). We plan on expanding the offering to include a more robust private software catalogs that layers on top of the OOTB Flox Catalog that ships with Flox. If you are interested in publishing your output or need revised versions of open source packages in Flox then it'll be very easy to have your own catalog to compliment the always-free Flox Catalog that Flox ships with today. Beyond that, we are focused on a number of services that help bring Nix's build to the enterprise. Over time we intend to sell a solution to enterprises - through subscriptions and services - so they can more effectively manage expansive and fragmented software supply chains. As part of developing custom tooling for enterprises, we think it's reasonable for them to participate in funding for that work.

we will always allow the CLI to stand alone for a local developer or CI runner. the service side of Flox is for those who want a faster performance, easy sharing, or eventually enterprise control. so while the CLI can use the closed service it's purely optional (and will always be optional)

Strong agree, I've been talking about it as "fearless development"

What's the top 2 examples you'd share if you had a persons attention for 60 seconds?

The community is working hard on that topic, while also trying to prioritize what's the most critical aspects for folks. Anything that sticks out the most for you?

The other bit is documentation

Anything specific you would mention if you had 30 seconds? (meaningful examples we can share on that point)

I'm might steal this and have this open up NixCon ;)

We have split this up into short and long term. Right now it's just to resolve it and then looking further into a more scalable/long term option. We haven't started an external fundraising campaign yet as I hope to make progress with one of the providers if possible first. Hope to update early next week.

They got acquired a bit of time ago and are now making some changes in the larger entity.

We will be holding the community call on Wednesday June 7th at 5pm (GMT+2) Planned Agenda * Brief budget and timeline review * Review/discuss all potential options * Brainstorm/Q&A

Info to join is in the original discourse post. Thank you again for jumping all in on this with us!

Just announced the bay area meetup -> https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nixos-20th-bay-area-meet-ticket...

Hope to see you all soon :)

+1 we should have more info tomorrow :)

Excited to see this being in progress. Have you checked out the docs effort spun up with the Nix Documentation team?

This is great! Does it include all talks? I just noticed that it might be missing https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/nix_and_nixos_runix/.

oh my. +1 for calling this out <3 I can link the github directly if it's helpful or send you info. I do apologize for this.

Focus on user feedback, making the developer experience golden for the CLI. Continue to work on widespread Nix community efforts/projects. Then on the product side, expand to provide an even more integrated solution for developers who want to work within teams or even small companies, largely, "bringing Nix to work".

It's exciting to see so much starting to be built with and on top of Nix. We've been working on enabling developers to go beyond the developer environment and into the later stages of the flow. Curious to get your thoughts on what you find the most compelling from the core Nix story/benefits.

Disclosure -> Ron here, co-founder at flox and NixOS Board Member

Bunch of the Nix folks are here to answer questions :)

flox team here, happy to answer any questions :)