nixpkgs VS digga

Compare nixpkgs vs digga and see what are their differences.

nixpkgs

Nix Packages collection & NixOS (by NixOS)

digga

A flake utility library to craft shell-, home-, and hosts- environments. (by divnix)
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nixpkgs digga
962 23
15,311 977
6.3% 0.4%
10.0 2.4
about 14 hours ago 8 months ago
Nix Nix
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

nixpkgs

Posts with mentions or reviews of nixpkgs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-19.
  • Combining Nix with Terraform for better DevOps
    4 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2024
    We’ve noticed that some users have been asking about how to use older versions of Terraform in their Nix setups [1, 2]. This is an example of the diverse needs of people and the importance of maintaining backward compatibility. We hope that nixpkgs-terraform will be a useful tool for these users.
  • Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024
    I think whateveracct was referring to is this link:

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...

    What that file is doing, is building a package, and it essentially is a combination of what Makefile and what RPM spec file does.

    I don't know if you're familiar with those tools, but if you aren't it takes some time to know them enough to understand what is happening. So why would be different here?

    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024
    That's doesn't happen in a single thread, but e.g. asynchronous multithreaded code can spit values in arbitrary order, and depending on what you do you can end up with a different result (floating point is just an example). Generally, you can't guarantee reproducibility because there's too much hardware state that can't be isolated even in a VM. Sure, 99% software doesn't depend on it or do cursed stuff like microarchitecture probing during building, and you won't care until you try to package some automated tests for a game physics engine or something like that. What can happen, inevitably happens.

    We don't need to be looking for such contrived examples actually, nixpkgs track the packages that aren't reproducible for much more trivial reasons:

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aiss...

    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024
    - trim boto3/botocore, to remove all stuff I did not use, that sucker on it's own is over 100MB

    The thing is what you need to understand is that the packages are primarily targeting the NixOS operating system, where in normal situation you have plenty of disk space, and you rather want all features to be available (because why not?). So you end up with bunch of dependencies, that you don't need. Alpine image for example was designed to be for docker, so the goal with all packages is to disable extra bells and whistles.

    This is why your result is bigger.

    To build a small image you will need to use override and disable all that unnecessary shit. Look at zulu for example:

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/developmen...

    you add alsa, fontconfig (probably comes with entire X11), freetype, xorg (oh, nvm fontconfig, it's added explicitly), cups, gtk, cairo and ffmpeg)

    Notice how your friend carefully extracts and places only needed files in the container, while you just bundle the entire zulu package with all of its dependencies in your project.

  • Use Ansible to create and start LXD virtual machines
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 Mar 2024
    #!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #! nix-shell -i bash #! nix-shell -p sops #! nix-shell -I https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/refs/tags/23.05.tar.gz source config.sh "$@"
  • What AI assistants are already bundled for Linux?
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Mar 2024
    NixOS just got tabbyml[1] which is built on llama-cpp. Working on systemsd services the weekend and updating latest tabbyml release which supports rocm in addition to cuda

    [1] https://github.com/TabbyML/tabby

    [2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/291744

  • Contributing Scrutiny to Nixpkgs
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Feb 2024
    It's easy to open a PR, but not so easy to get someone to actually review it.

    There's currently 165 open PRs by first-time contributors adding a new package, some of which have been just sitting there without review comments for years. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Apr+label%3A%22...

    At least they're meticulously labeled so it's easy to find them.

  • I Just Wanted Emacs to Look Nice – Using 24-Bit Color in Terminals
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
  • Going declarative on macOS with Nix and Nix-Darwin
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    I'm also using NixOS and working on Go projects, and had to deal with out-of-date Go releases. Nixpkgs generally does get the latest Go versions pretty quickly, but only in the unstable channels, they're not backported to NixOS releases. You can just grab that one package out of nixpkgs-unstable or nixos-unstable, like:

        (import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixpkgs-unstable.tar.gz") {}).go_1_21
  • NixOS: Declarative Builds and Deployments
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Jan 2024
    > What exactly would this "cleaner base" look like?

    My interpretation would be something like: the abandonment of software that is so poorly designed that it is difficult to package and/or run under Nix.

    This commit message (from one of my commits) details some of the struggles supporting Ruby under Nix:

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/b6c06e216bb3bface40e...

    Each of those problems is due to either:

    1. Some unmotivated contrivance in Bundler, where the maintainers refused to make their stuff less needlessly broken, or

    2. Ruby programmers in general not programming with packaging in mind (haven't touched Ruby/Rails professionally in a while, but when I did, it was par for the course to rsync/capistrano files around -- no one saw the utility of any sort of packaging)

    And the two really reinforce each other. Bundler is the de facto way to declare and pin dependencies at the app level, but then Bundler makes it nearly impossible (see the commit message for details) to package software using Bundler, which reinforces the "fuck it, we'll just rsync files around over SSH", which means no one pressures Bundler to Do The Right Thing.

    It's the same thing everywhere else. There are complaints elsewhere in this comment section about the nodejs/npm experience on Nix: same underlying problem. The design behind npm is so unnecessarily shit-tacular that it kinda sorta just barely works on its tier 1 platforms. I don't envy the brave souls that have worked on supporting npm packages on Nix.

digga

Posts with mentions or reviews of digga. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-08.
  • Looking for dotfiles repo examples
    9 projects | /r/NixOS | 8 Nov 2022
    I am using the home-manager input define in the flake andas recommended by digga. I am using the home namespace:
    9 projects | /r/NixOS | 8 Nov 2022
    I have been playing with digga for a few days in order to simplify my dotfiles repo. But I only got it half-working and there are little to no - useful - docs.
    9 projects | /r/NixOS | 8 Nov 2022
    This one issue may clear things up, seems like my config is a little outdated: https://github.com/divnix/digga/pull/385
  • Building a highly optimized home environment with Nix
    9 projects | /r/NixOS | 15 Sep 2022
    I'm new to the Nix world, but so far I've come across Divnix's Digga, Numtide's DevShell, and Misterio77's nix-starter-configs.
  • Need for a configuration framework?
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 7 Sep 2022
    There are config templates / configuration helper libraries that try to make this easier, for example digga/devos.
  • Sharing configuration between NixOS and MacOS
    6 projects | /r/NixOS | 25 May 2022
    The digga library, while being more complex to use than other solutions here, got a pretty elegant solution for it merged a few weeks ago. Still some cracks that are getting smoothed over, but it seems to work.
  • Best practices for organizing code repository for multiple machines? What about deployment?
    5 projects | /r/NixOS | 10 Apr 2022
    I like the concept digga/devos uses (unfortunately their stuff kind of is an overengineered incomprehensible mess): They use: - modules: for modules like in nixpkgs (i.e. stuff that defines options and generates configuration based on that options; are included into every host) - profiles: concrete configuration, can be included to host definitions - suites: sets of profiles (so you can for example have a desktop suite with all your profiles with "desktop" configuration options and apply that to all your desktop computers)
  • Nix: An idea whose time has come
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2022
  • The Curse of NixOS
    35 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2022
    https://github.com/divnix/devos is something close to a framework.

    I agree that language is too simple. Also I think some degree of IDE / language server support would help a lot. Refactoring modules, writing and importing custom functions was a bad experience for me - some arcane stacktraces were common, using repl was too verbose and with no clear way to debug whole configuration.

    35 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2022
    For the system, I like the devos template:

    https://github.com/divnix/devos

    The idea of flakes is how you define inputs, and you define the system (and packages, and shell etc.) in the outputs using the inputs. The inputs are git repos which point to other flakes. You can mix and match these as much as you want (see the devos repo for examples) and when you build the derivation, it generates a lockfile for exact commits in that point in time what were used in the given inputs.

    You commit the lockfile and in the other systems where you pull your config from the repo, it uses exactly those commits and installs the same versions as you did in your other systems.

    This was quite annoying and hard to do before flakes. Now it's easy.

    The problem what people face with building their system as a flake is combining the packages so you can point to `jq` from the unstable nixos and firefox from the stable train. I think this aspect needs better documentation so it wouldn't be so damn hard to learn (believe me, I know). Luckily there are projects like devos that give a nice template for people to play with (with documentation!)

    Another use for flakes is to create a development shell for your repo, an example what I did a while ago:

    https://github.com/pimeys/nix-prisma-example

    Either have `nix-direnv` installed, enter the directory and say `direnv allow`, or just `nix develop` and it will gather, compile and install the correct versions of packages to your shell. Updating the packages? Call `nix flake update` in the directory, commit the lockfile and everybody else gets the new versions to their shell.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nixpkgs and digga you can also consider the following projects:

asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files

easyeffects - Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications

spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.

waydroid - Waydroid uses a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on a regular GNU/Linux system like Ubuntu.

nixos-config - Mirror of https://code.balsoft.ru/balsoft/nixos-config

nixos - My NixOS Configurations

youtube-dl-gui - A cross-platform GUI for youtube-dl made in Electron and node.js

devshell - Per project developer environments