Nixverse Alternatives

nixverse reviews and mentions

• I like to install NixOS (declaratively)
  8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jun 2025

  Not to criticize the article, which is very well written, just some extra info:

  It seems for the author, the custom installer is mainly used for accepting user SSH public key, terminfo, and maybe also locale.

  Almost none of the packages the author listed get used, including zsh. Since NixOS is installed via nixos-anywhere, it runs a bash script to do everything, and all the script's dependencies will be pulled by nix.

  For people who don't want to build a custom installer, or their cloud environment doesn't allow one, you can simply host a script somewhere and download and run it on the remote machine to add your SSH public key and other customizations, including partitioning the disk.

  Note that the author used disko to partition the disk declaratively. Disko won't work for a machine with very limited ram, because disko needs to install tools to the ram to do the partition.

  I wrote a nix configuration library[1] that also does NixOS installation (uses nixes-anywhere under the hood), where you can choose between using disko, a default script[2] that handles 90% of the use cases (using only the default tools available on a vanilla NixOS installer, so nothing gets installed to the ram), or your own script.

  [1] https://github.com/hgl/nixverse