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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

53 sources
aidenn0·Dec 23, 2025
I'm going to mildly disagree here. NixOS is an improvement over RH et. al. even if you stray a small amount from the happy path; to use the GP example, if they couldn't do what they needed with the nixos LUKS options, they can click on a link from a related option definition and end up with https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.11/nixos/modu... which will describe much of how luks is configured. Often a small change there can widen the happy path, and with a PR, it can be made upstream in unstable relatively quickly and a release in the next several months.
In The Polyglot NixOS
kokada·Dec 11, 2025Submission

Show HN: A lightweight Git history explorer written in Go

I am a fan of gitk and its simplicity, however as https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/ is getting larger each day, it is becoming almost impossible to use it. I just did a quick test with commit e16041020b082ca847b3658ee1b69f8e6a4323b1 and after a few seconds the memory usage got close to 20GiB and I couldn't click on it (but the UI was still updating). This is probably because gitk tries to eagerly load all commits in memory, works fine for small/medium repositories, but nixpkgs is just too big. I rarely want to check an old commit (and for that case, I generally don't use gitk anyway), and since I was interested in https://pkg.go.dev/modernc.org/tk9.0 for a while and had a free month of ChatGPT+ to test, I decided to try and vibecode an alternative of gitk writing with Go and modernc.org/tk9.0. So here it is. The idea here is not to be a f
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ull featured replacement for gitk, but to re-implement the things I use. I tried to influence some of the architecture ideas to avoid the performance issues that the original have, so instead of loading all commits in memory it will load it in batches of 1000 (you can increase this using `-limit` flag but I recommend not setting this too high) at a time. Originally I also wanted to use only Go, but in the end I needed to use `git` for a few specific operations to keep it running fast (by default it still uses a pure Go implementation, but building it with `-tags=gitcli` is recommended). In the end I got what I wanted, a small, self contained app that reproduces most of the features that I want.
3 points · Open discussion
dayjah·Dec 1, 2025
Pretty sure I just ran a nix flake update. Here are the links from my journal: This went into nixpkgs: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/376988 Which then changed the api between and broke this: https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/nix/n... The fix took a few hours, I happened to be one of the first folks bit by it: https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/pull/1318 I also have in my notes that Emilazy is a super star: https://github.com/emilazy Notes on how I worked around it for the time it was broken: > To work around it on myside I tried various things. Fundamentally I rolled back to nixpkgs-24.11-darwin which needed corresponding changes to nix-darwin (nix-darwin-24.11) and home-manager (release-24.11) to get everything working.
In NixOS 25.11 released
foxheadman·Dec 1, 2025
I'm glad to see boot security prioritisation, and to see some of the fundamentals revisited, and scripts replaced with languages that contributors want to write in (NixOS leans heavy towards Rust). As the project doc notes: > This radical solution is only really feasible and/or interesting for appliances (i.e. non-interactive) systems. https://pad.lassul.us/nixos-perlless-activation > stops almost all attack vectors Can you explain a bit more about this? Is the idea that verity protects the integrity of the nix store, and then the boot process only runs binaries that don't expose any sort of arbitrary code functionality? I agree with https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/267982#issuecomment-... that the MITRE attack vector link doesn't help understanding much. Is the right idea: removing attack vectors is useful? (I agree.)
In NixOS 25.11 released
arianvanp·Nov 30, 2025
Previous version was in bash. With this change you can build a nixos image not containing bash or any shell whatsoever. Not having interpreted languages on the system at all is an effective hardening technique combined with verity store containing all your executables as it makes it impossible for attackers to add new executable files to the system which stops almost all attack vectors. You can read about the project here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/428908
In NixOS 25.11 released
evil-olive·Nov 30, 2025
yeah, the "entry-level" documentation is definitely one of the weak points of the Nix ecosystem. I'd compare it to trying to learn how to do oil changes on your car and only finding "car guy" web forums full of posts about transmission rebuilds and 3D printing your own carburetors. my recommendation (as I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm a 10+ year NixOS user) would be to install NixOS on a VM or spare laptop and tinker with configuring it. you can follow the breadcrumbs, for example enabling sshd [0] has a "declared in" link to [1] where you can read the Nix source code of what that NixOS option actually does on your system. flakes, modules, and overlays are all relatively "advanced" parts of the ecosystem, you don't need to know them as a new user. in particular, you will find many blog posts telling you to use flakes right from the b
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eginning. that's an option, but not at all required. 0: https://search.nixos.org/options?channel=25.11&show=services... 1: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.11/nixos/modu...
In NixOS 25.11 released
Ericson2314·Nov 24, 2025
On Nixpkgs master, you can cross compile to MinGW and Cygwin. Native Cygwin builds are also currently in progress: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/447520. I would expect this to be done very soon, there year even (holidays permitting). There is a MinGW build of Nix but it is missing some features. There has been MSVC build of a fork in the past and I would like to revive that also. There some some open questions relating to Nixpkgs's heavy use of Bash, but longer term I would like to compete for Windows in all ways: - Support all cross (MinGW, Cygwin/MSYS2, MSVC ABI with LLVM, MSVC with Wine) - Be Cygwin packages - Be https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages / https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages - Be VCPKG All these things have slightly different trade-offs, and Nixpkgs is very good at portability, so we should simply do them all
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In A time-travelling door bug in Half Life 2

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