I want to develop a game and am considering collaborating with others, potentially even making it open-source.
To make this process smoother, I need to establish an easy-to-replicate development environment—one that can be set up by non-programmers (such as artists) but is also simple for me to configure so I can focus on actual development.
I’ve explored various options (Docker, Podman, Anaconda, NixOS, VMs), but the choices are overwhelming, and I’m unsure which one is best for my needs.
I’ve had partial success with a Fedora+i3wm virtual environment (VM), creating a plug-and-play experience. However, this setup requires extra space (~3GB for the OS) and includes software already installed on the host system. It also requires users to learn i3wm and possibly use the command line, which may not be ideal for everyone.
I would appreciate any advice on how to approach this effectively.
Edit: An example of things to setup:
- The right .Net Sdks version
- Git
- Git LFS
- Format Checks
- VScode (+ extensions)
- Godot (+ extensions)
Nix is probably the best way to get all of those things set up without shipping a whole distro, but there will be a bit of a learning curve. If you’d like something a bit easier to set up for development (still based on Nix), I’d recommend devenv.sh.
Oh yeah, and Nix has the advantage that you don’t need containers. If you want to run a graphical app in a container it might be tricky to access the window manager on the host system. Maybe that’s why you were setting up i3? Yeah, containers are great and flexible, but they also have a variety of downsides so Nix is better ;)
I agree; and I wanted to mention that you don’t need NixOS which is a full distro. Nix the package manager can be installed on any Linux distro, on Macos, or on Windows with WSL. You can set up your reproducible environment by including a devenv config in your repo, or a Nix flake.
There is documentation available for flakes here: https://zero-to-nix.com/concepts/flakes/