nixpkgs VS nixos

Compare nixpkgs vs nixos and see what are their differences.

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nixpkgs nixos
962 19
15,311 152
6.3% -
10.0 9.3
1 day ago 6 days ago
Nix Nix
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 only
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.

nixos

Posts with mentions or reviews of nixos. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-16.
  • miasma
    6 projects | /r/neovim | 16 Jun 2023
    I don't know. Have been using colorbuddy for ages now and it has always done exactly what I want. I don't need the "instant reaload" that lush advertices, doing :source on the colorscheme file, does the same for me to preview changes instantly. This is my theme, in case you need something to start with: - https://github.com/pinpox/nixos/blob/main/home-manager/modules/nvim/lua/config/pinpox-colors.lua
  • Looking for a transfer tool for command line
    4 projects | /r/commandline | 22 Aug 2022
    I use this to serve a directory temporarily.
  • Bluetooth headphones problem
    2 projects | /r/NixOS | 8 Jun 2022
    I can't remember why I put that workaround in there, might not be needed any more. The above config is part of my dotfiles, I use my Bose blueutooth headphones by connecting them via the blueman-applet if the don't pair automatically
  • NixOS for selfhosting?
    4 projects | /r/NixOS | 22 Sep 2021
    Yep, I have two different modules with defaults for server and for desktop. Host-specific settings are set in the according /machines//configuration.nix file. Most stuff is modularized into modules that can be reuesed and enabled at will.
    4 projects | /r/NixOS | 22 Sep 2021
    You can find all my configs here
  • Nix-rice: rice your system with nix
    3 projects | /r/NixOS | 15 Sep 2021
    Yep, I'm using the toJSON function already. The problem I had, was that not all applications use JSON as configuration format. Also the nix code gets very long, if you have to write the whole template as a string, which I find quite unreadable. Mustache is a pretty simple frequently used templating language, here is an example template that get's rendered by the nix code above.
  • Ricing with NixOS?
    10 projects | /r/NixOS | 15 Sep 2021
    https://github.com/pinpox/nixos/blob/main/home-manager/modules/awesome.nix https://github.com/pinpox/dotfiles-awesome
    10 projects | /r/NixOS | 15 Sep 2021
    My system uses a uniform colorscheme defined here. Configs for all applications I use read that and use the same colors. The wallpapers are randomly generated by a tool I wrote, it also automatically matches the colorscheme. Icons and symbols are colored the same way for awesomeWM.
  • My neovim config with a colorscheme created with nix
    4 projects | /r/neovim | 24 Aug 2021
    In case you are interested I use this and this to generate colorschemes, awesome config and a matching wallpaper
  • Dumping Tmux
    3 projects | /r/i3wm | 7 Jul 2021
    Check out wezterm it has replaced tmux for me. Very active development, fast and just the right amount of features for my taste. It is configured in Lua, so if you are doing that for neovim already, it's another plus. I use it in combination with awesomeWM. My (not very special) config is here if you need something to start with.

What are some alternatives?

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

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

eww - ElKowars wacky widgets

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

git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files

wezterm - A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust

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.

nix-doom-emacs - doom-emacs packaged for Nix

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

digga - A flake utility library to craft shell-, home-, and hosts- environments.

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