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Life & fun · March 12, 2026

Nix on Windows –- proof-of-concept demo

How puffnfresh, my coworker, made a single command to download, assemble, and boot the VM image is arguably as cool as the port itself!

Nix on Windows –- proof-of-concept demo launched on March 12, 2026 with 9 votes, #1,237 of 23,380 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 5% of March 2026

What it does

Contribute to nix-windows/nix-windows-demo development by creating an account on GitHub.

Builds a Windows ValidationOS VM image with a cross-compiled Nix package manager pre-installed. No Windows license or installation required -- ValidationOS is a free minimal Windows environment intended for testing. NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNFREE=1 nix run --impure This builds a ValidationOS VHDX with Nix baked in and boots it in QEMU. The build is deterministic -- no VM is started during the build, files are injected directly into the disk image using guestfish. ssh -o WarnWeakCrypto=no -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i windows/test-windows-key -p 2222 Administrator@localhost "C:\nix\bin\nix-build C:\demo.nix" ssh -o WarnWeakCrypto=no -o IdentitiesOnly=yes -i windows/test-windows-key -p 2222…from github.com

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