Building PDF documents via Sphinx depends of LaTeX being available, this resulted in quite heavy container images which took also very long to build. Out of curiosity I tested to build a minimal Texlive environment based on Nix and got surprisingly nice results, both the image size and the build time dropped significantly.

When experimenting with NixOS containers, it is sometimes quite nice to just build the container derivation and inspect the result. Being able to use the remote building features makes this even more convenient.

Slide content plus my notes from the talk "Deep Dive into NixOPS' Container Backend" which a gave at a NixOS Meetup in Munich.