When showing Nix or NixOS to newcomers, the first instinct is often to run theNixOS Docker image onDocker or Podman.This week we’re having a look at how to do the same withsystemd’s systemd-nspawn facility via the machinectlcommand.This has huge benefits to both trying out NixOS and also professionally usingit like a sidecar VM, as we shall see.If you’re using Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, or similar, jump right in!

When showing Nix or NixOS to newcomers, the first instinct is often to run the NixOS Docker image on Docker or Podman. This week we’re having a look at how to do the same with systemd’s systemd-nspawn facility via the machinectl command. This has huge benefits to both trying out NixOS and also professionally using it like a sidecar VM, as we shall see. If you’re using Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, or similar, jump right in!

In this tutorial-like article, we learned, how to quickly run a nearly full instance of NixOS on any GNU/Linux distribution that uses systemd (e.g. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Rocky Linux, etc…).

This NixOS instance can be configured to our needs and also be run like a sidecar to our normal host system. systemd can treat it like a system service that boots up by default with the host system, using machinectl enable nixos.