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Machatoday at 5:55 PM2 repliesview on HN

So Discord, and quite a lot of software like this has actually two layers of updates. There's updates of the web page (which is basically writing a bunch of JS to the home directory) which NixOS does nothing to prevent, and then there's updates of the host program (i.e. Electron) which NixOS disables.

Jetbrains Toolbox is in a sort of different category with tools like Rustup, since it's a package manager of its own. If you manage your IDEs with Toolbox, then your IDE versions are "outside Nix" and not managed by Nix. It's just packaged into its own pretend FHS environment and then doesn't know anything about it being on Nix. That said, updates of Toolbox itself will need to happen through your package manager.

As a last comment, why run Docker Desktop on Linux at all? Like I understand on Windows and Mac - docker is inherently tied to Linux so the Windows/Mac apps abstract away the fact that it's running a VM and doing a bunch of port mapping and filesystem mounting under the hood so you can pretend it's not running on a VM, but on Linux I've always just installed docker straight onto the host.


Replies

k_roytoday at 6:29 PM

There’s more to Docker Desktop than just “oh it’s just docker underneath”

1. Unified experience across Windows, Mac, Linux

2. The security posture is much stronger by default. Many people, who would probably be considered the “target audience” for Docker Desktop, don’t bother to make docker-ce rootless, or don’t use podman, so running it in a VM is better, though admittedly often annoying.

3. Not everybody is a CLI warrior. Docker Desktop gives a decent GUI, ways to monitor and control containers visually, and even deploy kubernetes with a single click.

bikelangtoday at 6:13 PM

This is a really helpful explanation - thank you!

Regarding Docker Desktop on Linux - yeah definitely not strictly necessary. Sometimes it’s just convenient to have a UI instead of fumbling around trying to remember some cli incantation to check for dangling volumes or what-have-you. I think ideally I want to move to Podman anyways - but I’m using pop_os as my dev distro at the moment and am stuck on an older version which doesn’t have their native `podman compose` implementation yet