Tux Machines

Why Is NixOS Popular Again?

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 15, 2022

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There's been a renewed interest in NixOS, and its package manager, nixpkgs. The key feature of Nix is declarative configuration – the Linux-based operating system is defined by a set of declarative packages built by the Nix package manager, nixpkgs. It was originally released in 2003 but lately has been seeing renewed interest: a more formal team structure around development (link), new startups built around Nix, 30% YoY user growth (link), and exponential growth in GitHub stars. Is NixOS gaining rapid adoption, or is it just hype? My interest in Nix came during the mid-2010s when I looked at it as a model to solve to the difficulty of installing and configuring packages inside Docker containers. There were a few attempts at making a container-native OS (notably, CoreOS), but neither those operating systems nor NixOS ultimately stuck. There's been a few notable startups using Nix, but otherwise, I haven't seen much adoption in the wild. Replit uses Nix to decrease startup times for REPLs (which comes mostly from installing packages). Cardano, the blockchain, uses Nix to configure nodes.

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