NixOS


Pierre-Étienne Meunier (TAPDANCE)

Presented at the developer meetup, on 15 May 2018.

Nix is a purely fonctionnal package manager, which means it’s stateless. NixOS is a Linux distribution based on it. In Nix, packages never interact, nor have access to the same configuration files. The notion of package is generalized to allow different software to still produce a common configuration file. Nix is also a small programming language created to describ the states of a machine, which includes configuration and installed packages.

It follows the compilations reproductibility, which allows the detection of a change in the version of a compiler, library, …

NixOS is a Nix version designed for cloud computing, which allows to manage machines distantly, by just installing the necessary packages, without needing to create a full image.