Top all-time · #4377
Sander van der Burg
Personal blog · sandervanderburg.blogspot.comprogrammingsystems
Sander van der Burg's personal blog at sandervanderburg.blogspot.com covers programming and systems. Since 2013, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “An Evaluation and Comparison of Snappy Ubuntu and Nix”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link these posts as an in-depth overview of Nix and Docker and as hands-on accounts of NixOS, Amiga Linux and NetBSD. They are also cited in comparisons of Nix, Guix and other package systems.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- An Evaluation and Comparison of Snappy Ubuntu and Nix3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-09-25
- /2025/01/running-linux-on-my-amiga-4000.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-02
- Running Linux on my Amiga 40002 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-05
- /2012/11/on-nix-and-gnu-guix.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-14
What Hacker News says?
Here is a recent blog post where somebody tried to install Debian on an Amiga 4000 with an 68040 running at 25 MHz. https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/01/running-linux-... I didn't find what Debian version they tried but I think it's implied it's a recent version. They ran into memory issues. They had only 48MB while the recommendations are to use 64MB. It did boot though until it threw errors because of mem…
Comment linking /2025/01/running-linux-on-my-amiga-4000.html
on “Hard Rust requirements from May onward”Submitted Running Linux on my Amiga 4000 as a story · 33 points
HN discussionThis isn't a tutorial, but for an overview of Nix and Docker read https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2020/07/on-using-nix-a...
Comment linking /2020/07/on-using-nix-and-docker-as-deployment.html
on “Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit”Submitted Amiga IFF file format experiments (2012) as a story · 13 points
HN discussionMuch more in-depth article about Nix and Docker, covers how they overlap, contrast and complement one another: https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2020/07/on-using-nix-a...
Comment linking /2020/07/on-using-nix-and-docker-as-deployment.html
on “Building Container Images with Nix”Submitted Running NetBSD on my Amiga 4000 as a story · 9 points
HN discussionProbably the definitive document making the case for Nix (and Guix by extension) is Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis [0] . The introduction is a good read by itself. I have never used Guix/GuixSD but have heard good things about it. Behind the scenes it uses the Nix package manager and offers a subset of Nix packages licensed as free software. Whereas Nix/NixOS uses the Nix expression language, Guix/GuixSD uses a Guile Sc…
Comment linking /2012/11/on-nix-and-gnu-guix.html
on “Ask HN: How do you install developer tools on a fresh system?”Submitted An Evaluation and Comparison of Snappy Ubuntu and Nix as a story · 7 points
HN discussionYes: http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2015/04/an-evaluation-a...
Comment linking /2015/04/an-evaluation-and-comparison-of-snappy.html
on “Canonical bringing Snappy Ubuntu to phone and desktop”Submitted Running Linux on my Amiga 4000 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDeluxePaint used IFF. Here's a good writeup https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2012/06/iff-file-forma...
Comment linking /2012/06/iff-file-format-experiments.html
on “Data Formats: 3D, Audio, Image”Submitted Developing an s6-RC back end for the Nix process management framework as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhy the extra effort on the GNU Project's part to create Guix? What are the advantages over just adopting Nix? Doesn't this mean that everything the Nix project packages has to be repackaged for Guix, and vice-versa? I found this comparison at http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-nix-and-gnu-...
Comment linking /2012/11/on-nix-and-gnu-guix.html
on “GNU Guix 0.8.2 released”Submitted On NixOps, Disnix, service deployment and infrastructure deployment as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI don't think Canonical has even done its homework before going full-steam on Snappy. They seem to have completely ignored the Nix and Guix projects, which also offer atomic installation and rollback of software, but without many of the flaws that Snappy seems to have like application bundling (duplication of dependencies amongst packages), package namespace issues (identifying packages by name+version+developer, no…
Comment linking /2015/04/an-evaluation-and-comparison-of-snappy.html
on “The Future of Shipping Software on Ubuntu”Submitted Deploying NPM packages with the Nix package manager as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI looked closely at Nix and there is a lot to like there. The thing that turned me off is that it is just too complex. Going from something like Dockerfiles to Nix is just a huge leap. Example: http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2014/07/managing-privat... A lesson from Docker is that we have to make this dead simple. It has to be something you can grok in 15-60m.
Comment linking /2014/07/managing-private-nix-packages-outside.html
on “Thoughts on a Container Native Package System”Submitted Using Nix while doing development as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'm a NixOS user and I know Gobolinux is a few years older, this blogpost (from 2011) was actually useful for me at the time when I decided to pick NixOS for my workstations: https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2011/12/evaluation-and... Nowadays I'm also playing with Guix as well, I kinda love that everything can be unified in a more decent language (Guile Scheme) than Nix: https://guix.gnu.org/
Comment linking /2011/12/evaluation-and-comparison-of-gobolinux.html
on “An experimental Linux distribution that Redefines the filesystem hierarchy”You just plug Nix into a service manager that you have Nix bring along for you. Many years ago, I did this for a proof-of-concept at work with supervisord[1] and flake.nix. Devenv[2] builds in[3] support for process-compose[4], which GP mentioned. A few years ago, one long-time Nixer even created[5] a framework, nix-processmgmt[6] that abstracts over various service managers including supervisord and s6[7], which ca…
Comment linking /2020/02/a-declarative-process-manager-agnostic.html
on “What Has Docker Become?”May be of interest - here's what running Linux and NetBSD on Amiga is like these days: https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/02/running-netbsd... https://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2025/01/running-linux-...
Comment linking /2025/01/running-linux-on-my-amiga-4000.html
on “Amiga Unix (Amix)”
