1.3 Installing Nix the right way: multi-user, flakes, and what to avoid

There are several ways to install Nix. The most obvious ones (your distro's package manager, Docker) work, but they quietly give you a worse experience for months. This lesson takes you from a clean Linux or macOS machine to a working Nix installation with flakes enabled. Everything later in the course builds on this setup.

In this video

• Why you should not install Nix with apt or run it in Docker, even though both work
• Single-user or multi-user installation: which one to pick, and what actually lands on your system
• What those 32 nixbld users are for, and why they make every build safe
• The one config line that turns on flakes and the modern nix commands, no daemon restart needed
• Your first nix shell moment: run a package, exit, and it's gone. Where did it go? That question drives the next videos.

After this lesson

You have a correctly set up Nix with flakes enabled, and a first mental picture of the daemon and the sandboxes you just installed.

Links:

• https://nixos.org/download