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NixOS
nixpkgs
Nix2013–2026
NixOS / nixpkgs

nixpkgs

Nix Packages collection & NixOS

Systems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
360Distinct people
597Mentions
11Explicit recommenders
26.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Nix Packages collection & NixOS

GitHub

Where it is used

  • NixOS — NixOS uses Nixpkgs as a core part of the distribution; it is built around Nixpkgs. This powers its reproducible, declarative system configuration. Source

What people are saying

I love NixOS, it's my daily driver on my personal laptop, but it definitely has given me more than its fair share of headaches. If everything you're going to do is in Nixpkgs,…

tombert used a recommendation phrase. 11 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:05:26 PM UTC.

Apfel-LLM: Drop direct repository link

Read the discussion on HN. A full-thread summary is not available yet.

A technical vision for the Haskell ecosystem direct repository linkDebated

Commenters debate whether Haskell's primary bottleneck is technical performance, such as compile time and incremental builds, or its lack of a coherent, polished ecosystem for building diverse applications like web and desktop software. While some argue that foundational libraries and better developer experience are the missing pieces, others contend that the language's utility is constrained by fragmented tooling and unclear positioning compared to more universal alternatives.

17 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year597 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-12-15 16:18:08 UTC to 2026-10-21 00:27:48 UTC.

02550751001252013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 1 submissions, 12 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 23 mentions; 1 submissions, 22 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 22 mentions; 0 submissions, 22 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 21 mentions; 0 submissions, 21 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 31 mentions; 1 submissions, 30 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 59 mentions; 1 submissions, 58 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 112 mentions; 3 submissions, 109 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 72 mentions; 3 submissions, 69 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 81 mentions; 5 submissions, 76 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 77 mentions; 3 submissions, 74 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 53 mentions; 5 submissions, 48 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 25 mentions; 2 submissions, 23 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13112
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC23122
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC22022
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC21021
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC31130
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC59158
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1123109
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC72369
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC81576
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC77374
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC53548
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC25223

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Nixpkgs is a collection of over 140,000 software packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager. It also implements NixOS, a purely-functional Linux distribution. Manuals NixOS Manual - how to install, configure, and maintain a purely-functional Linux distribution Nixpkgs Manual - contributing to Nixpkgs and using programming-language-specific Nix expressions Nix Package Manager Manual - how to write Nix expressions (programs), and how to use Nix command line tools Community Discourse Forum Matrix Chat Official wiki Community-maintained list of ways to get in touch (Discord, Telegram, IRC, etc.) Other Project Repositories The sources of all official Nix-related projects are in the NixOS organization on GitHub. Here are some of the main ones: Nix - the purely functional package manager NixOps - the tool to remotely deploy NixOS machines nixos-hardware - NixOS profiles to optimize settings for different hardware Nix RFCs - the formal process for making substantial changes to the community NixOS homepage - the NixOS.org website hydra - our continuous integration system NixOS Branding - NixOS branding Continuous Integration and Distribution Nixpkgs and NixOS are built and tested by our continuous integration system, Hydra. Continuous package builds for unstable/master Continuous package builds for the NixOS 26.05 release Tests for unstable/master Tests for the NixOS 26.05 release Artifacts successfully built with Hydra are published to cache at https://cache.nixos.org/. When successful build and test criteria are met, the Nixpkgs expressions are distributed via Nix channels. Contributing Nixpkgs is among the most active projects on GitHub. While thousands of open issues and pull requests might seem like a lot at first, it helps to consider it in the context of the scope of the project. Nixpkgs describes how to build tens of thousands of pieces of software and implements a Linux distribution. The GitHub Insights page gives a sense of the project activity. Community contributions are always welcome through GitHub Issues and Pull Requests. For more information about contributing to the project, please visit the contributing page. Donations The infrastructure for NixOS and related projects is maintained by a nonprofit organization, the NixOS Foundation. To ensure the continuity and expansion of the NixOS infrastructure, we are looking for donations to our organization. You can donate to the NixOS Foundation through SEPA bank transfers or by using Open Collective: License Nixpkgs is licensed under the MIT License. NoteMIT license does not apply to the packages built by Nixpkgs, merely to the files in this repository (the Nix expressions, build scripts, NixOS modules, etc.). It also might not apply to patches included in Nixpkgs, which may be derivative works of the packages to which they apply. The aforementioned artifacts are all covered by the licenses of the respective packages.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

77 sources
kenada·Oct 27, 2024
Improving the interaction with language ecosystems was one of the motivating reasons for how I approached the [rework][1] of Darwin support in nixpkgs. A lot of Rust stuff was simply impossible to build due to their SDK needs and how hard it was to override the SDK correctly, but that’s fixed now (with a few remaining cases that will be fixed in the final staging cycle before 24.11). I expect other ecosystems to benefit similarly, especially since Darwin support looks more like a native toolchain while still being built and provided by nixpkgs. For example, Zed and Wezterm (previously failing intermittently on x86_64-darwin) now build on Darwin. Someone even has [Firefox building from source][2]. PyTorch will be able to support MPS, and MoltenVK will be able to use Metal 3 features if your system supports them. [1]: https://github.com/Nix
Read the rest
OS/nixpkgs/pull/346043 [2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/350384
In NixOS is not reproducible
Aleksana·Oct 26, 2024
In fact, reproducing artifacts will have more uncertain factors without a correctly designed tool chain. Accidentally introducing timestamps is just one common case, others include the order of multi-threaded builds, Haskell's GHC compiler has had this problem for a long time, and sometimes Rust seems to be affected as well. There are also some tricky situations, which are related to the features of the file system. It is misleading to say that NixOS has complete reproducibility. However, NixOS is indeed more advanced in some aspects. You can reproduce a working development environment, you can easily test the build process you will deploy to CI locally, move your favorite configurations between computers, or share certain parts between them. This is the benefits of declarative package management (or package build system). Unreproducible
Read the rest
situations do occur during the building process of packages (derivation), but these situations usually have nothing to do with functionality, and it is easy to see where the problem is with diffscope. We have specifically tracked and dealt with these issues. At present, they are still within a relatively controllable range. See https://reproducible.nixos.org/ https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?q=sort%3Aupdated-des... I would also thank @anthk for introducing people to Guix. As a late sibling to Nix (the ecosystem), Guix is cleaner in handling the basic toolchain and does a better job in full source bootstrapping, which we are working hard to learn and improve. However, Guix and Nix have the same constraints, they can only reproduce the way the system is built and composed, not the artifact itself. We both track reproducibility problems, and there are interested maintainers actively addressing these issues. See https://issues.guix.gnu.org/search?query=reproducible When it comes to whether you should choose NixOS (or Guix), I think you should weigh your workflow, usage habits, and learning costs. Given the significant difference in the way of thinking, we can't make it painless for people to migrate from distributions like Debian/Arch or Ubuntu to NixOS. But if you really need it, I believe you will still come one day
In NixOS is not reproducible
matrss·Oct 14, 2024
> Using shared libraries is optimizing for a very different set of constraints than nixos, which iirc keeps like 90 versions of the same thing around just so everyone can have the one they want. This isn't really true. One version of nixpkgs (i.e. a specific commit of https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs) generally has one version of every package and other packages from the same nixpkgs version depending on it will use the same one as a dependency. Sometimes there are multiple versions (different major versions, different compile time options, etc.) but that is the same with other distros as well. In that sense, NixOS is very similar to a more traditional distribution, just that NixOS' functional package management better encapsulates the process of making changes to its package repository compared to the ad-hoc nature of a mutable set of bi
Read the rest
nary packages like traditional distros and makes it possible to see and rebuild the dependency graph at every point in time while a more traditional distro doesn't give you e.g. the option to pretend that it's 10 days or months ago. You only really get multiple versions of the same packages if you start mixing different nixpkgs revisions, which is really only a good idea in edge cases. Old ones are also kept around for rollbacks, but those can be garbage collected.
In The state of GNU/Linux and a case against shared object libraries
steeleduncan·Oct 2, 2024
Maybe I'm missing something, but the only branch in github:nixos/nixpkgs I can see receiving fixes is the 24.05 branch getting fixes backported from unstable. The last commit I can see to the 23.11 branch is about 3 months ago This would imply only 9 months of security patches before I would need to upgrade the server. That is of course a far less risky process with NixOS, so perhaps that is ok, but it is a lot more work than the 5 years you get (free) with Ubuntu/Debian https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/branches/active
In NixOS is a good server OS, except when it isn't

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