nixwrt VS nixpkgs-channels

tl;dr: here are three commercial embedded NixOS uses and a couple of other embedded NixOS projects

1. LumiGuide uses NixOS for their embedded systems, which track automatic bicycle rentals at little solar-powered stations IIRC: https://av.tib.eu/media/39625 (also some coverage here: https://www.worksonarm.com/blog/nixos/ )

2. Yakkertech uses NixOS for their embedded systems, which do baseball pitch tracking: https://av.tib.eu/media/50713

3. Swift Navigation uses NixOS for CI/CD for the embedded systems they use for GPS and navigation: https://blog.swiftnav.com/using-nixos-to-manage-hardware-tes...

I'd only heard of the first two, and discover the third just now.

There are also two downstream distros/related projects that target embedded systems, but idk how much commercial use they've yet seen, if any:

a. https://github.com/telent/nixwrt

b. https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

You might want to check out https://github.com/telent/nixwrt and https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os as solutions with similar goals. The former is a promising but yet-unfinished way of using Nix to manage a router, while the latter is a similar way of using Nix to generate an immutable OS image.

And, if you take into consideration my personal, subjective opinions on what a distro must be (declarative, fearless to tinker with, mostly binary based but with easy overrides, mostly stateless, easy to roll back in case something goes wrong), then that leaves pretty much two options: NixOS and Guix, and because I don't really like LISP syntax, I go with NixOS as my favourite distro for desktops and servers. For embedded, I've recently tried NixWrt and it seems to work quite well, however I'm still using OpenWRT for "mission-critical" routers.

LC_ALL=C NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-13.10.tar.gz nix shell --impure -f '' kde4.gwenview -c gwenview

{ pkgs ? import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/b58ada326aa612ea1e2fb9a53d550999e94f1985.tar.gz") {} }: pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation rec { pname = "silicon-info"; version = "1.0.3"; src = pkgs.fetchurl { url = "https://github.com/billycastelli/Silicon-Info/releases/download/1.0.3/Silicon.Info.app.zip"; sha256 = "raa6RmXiqilz4vrvWfMSzIKuaJUFI2xMLUErw64Y0Pk="; }; installPhase = '' mkdir -p $out/Applications mv "Silicon Info.app" $out/Applications ''; meta = with pkgs.lib; { description = "Silicon Info is a tiny menu bar application allows the user to quickly view the architecture of the currently running application."; license = licenses.mit; homepage = "https://github.com/billycastelli/Silicon-Info"; platforms = platforms.darwin; }; }

let unstableTarball = fetchTarball "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-unstable.tar.gz"; in { allowUnfree = true; packageOverrides = pkgs: rec { unstable = import unstableTarball { }; obs = pkgs.buildEnv { name = "obs settings unstable"; paths = [ unstable.obs-studio ]; }; };

Example from the bluetooth module(https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/blob/2628f20267d0c917772abc4c0a7c35788a740b31/nixos/modules/services/hardware/bluetooth.nix)