nixpkgs VS systemd

Compare nixpkgs vs systemd and see what are their differences.

nixpkgs

Nix Packages collection & NixOS (by NixOS)

systemd

The systemd System and Service Manager (by systemd)
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nixpkgs systemd
962 495
15,311 12,294
6.3% 1.7%
10.0 10.0
about 5 hours ago 7 days ago
Nix C
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.

systemd

Posts with mentions or reviews of systemd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-21.
  • X.org Server Clears Out Remnants for Supporting Old Compilers
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2024
    - Mysterious PID1 crash related to timedatectl, resolved by replacing /etc/localtime with a regular file instead of symlink (to a file on same FS). How do you strace PID1 to get some idea what's going on? You don't. Good thing timezone management needs to be part of init!

    - Mysterious issue in resolvectl, some sort of race condition, 2-year old bug report https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/22775 - at least you actually don't have to use this one.

    And those are just the two that I've had to spend hours on in the past few years.

    Not using systemd is barely a choice, even if you don't use systemd itself you nearly have to use things which are designed in exactly the same bad ways (polkit, systemd-udevd), there are several (negative) changes which even systemd-resistant distros have adopted for conformity which were first driven by systemd, lots of software has completely removed their provided init-scripts and replaced them with systemd unit files only so you have to write your own or go dig it up from the git history...

    Oh and it's extremely brittle and one little piece breaking means you can't boot at all, not even in single user, since everything is jammed into PID1... so good luck even examining what's going on.

    I could go on but of course you've already seen and chosen to ignore any argument I could make.

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2024)
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2024
    Hi HN! I'm a Linux security engineer looking for work on Open Source software. I've done some security work in the Linux Kernel (containerization primitives), in systemd as well as some work on Secure Boot.

    Notably I've implemented auto-enrollment of secure boot keys in systemd. See (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/20255 & https://lpc.events/event/16/contributions/1259/).

    Lately, I've been very interested in MicroVMs and minimizing the Linux Kernel attack surface.

    Message me if any of that sounds interesting!

  • New Renderers for GTK
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2024
    The xdg-portal attempt was misguided and I don't beleive anyone is pursuing it at this point. Ideally drm-leasing would be managed by the login manager, allowing multiple compositors to lease connectors and run independently on other monitors, as well as being used for VR headsets. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/29078.

    Sidenote: I hacked the wayland protocol implementation for gnome into working at least for SteamVR, but at least with AMD gpus there is some serious bug preventing the card from performing properly. It basically throttles itself for no reason and never hits the refresh rates needed for smooth VR, especially since there is no asynchronous reprojection at the moment. So while ideally the drm-leasing problem would be solved already there are other even more important problems to solve with linux VR for now.

  • A Suprising Discovery Inside the Steam Deck's APU
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    > It is very hardware dependent.

    NVIDIA GPUs definitely make things more difficult, at least in the suspend-then-hibernate case. Here's where I reported a hacky workaround:

    https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/systemds-suspend-then-...

    See also:

    https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/27559

    NVIDIA kinda sorta just doesn't give a shit, unfortunately.

  • Why would you still want to use strace in 2023? [video]
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jan 2024
    > You'll still care that you can write that file, right?

    Sometimes you don't need it.

    systemd itself just checks that `/etc/initrd-release` exists and runs in initrd mode changing its default target to boot into (IIRC you can also manually change the default target to `initrd.target` in the initrd, but this way the default systemd vendored files don't need to be touched).

    https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/7f13af72f89452950226...

  • Systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024
    I generally embrace systemd and have been pretty happy with it but there's one component which simply doesn't work correctly and that's systemd-resolved in combination with DNSSEC. I eventually had to replace it with Knot Resolver which works flawlessly on the same machine / network.

    https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/9867

    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024
    There's a willingness from the systemd devs to start incorporating Rust into it, possibly quite soon: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/19598
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024
    uint8_t signature[8]; /* "LPKSHHRH" */

    == Lennart Poettering, Kay Siver, Harald Hoyer, Red Hat

    I don't know the details but I heard at some point Kay and Lennart had a falling out within the project. By the time I got involved in journald development @ CoreOS, neither Kay nor Harald were visibly participating anymore... It was kind of annoying, as it left just Lennart to review any journald PRs, who was obviously busy, but eventually got around to it. I think it's worth noting that despite being the person who receives all the systemd hate, Lennart didn't promptly abandon maintenance of the project after getting installed everywhere.

    [0] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v255/src/libsystemd/...

  • Earlyoom – Early OOM Daemon for Linux
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Dec 2023
    Or systemd's systemd-oomd https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/15206

    The answer for both of those is "if you're unfortunate enough to be running a 2.6 kernel linux server from 2005, then you can't use cgroupsv2 and thus can't use oomd or systemd-oomd".

  • Systemd's new blue screen of death (systemd-bsod)
    2 projects | /r/linux | 9 Dec 2023
    Ok? I never said he wasn't involved, but he didn't create this tool. And for your info, he wasn't the only systemd developer that was involved as well. But of course, you immediatly started throwing a tantrum at just reading his name because all you can whine about is how systemd is the source of all evil and Poettering is the devil!

What are some alternatives?

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

openrc - The OpenRC init system

tini - A tiny but valid `init` for containers

inotify-tools - inotify-tools is a C library and a set of command-line programs providing a simple interface to inotify.

s6 - The s6 supervision suite.

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

earlyoom - earlyoom - Early OOM Daemon for Linux

supervisor - Supervisor process control system for Unix (supervisord)

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

dracut - dracut the event driven initramfs infrastructure

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