Post #831334

2026-03-26 19:11 UTC

More Nix and non-systemd goodness that I&#39;ve just learned about. Finix: fast init Nix https://github.com/finix-community/finix An (experimental) Nixos system using finit. The maintainer reached out to me on discourse and cued me in on this project after I posted about my Liberated Systemd overwrite. I didn&#39;t know anyone was working on this, but I&#39;m pleasently surprised! It&#39;s usable right now and (according to them) would benefit from some more experienced users to test things out. I&#39;ve not tried it yet (I expect some stuff to not work, but I&#39;ve seen some setups from folks that appear to have full DEs and WMs). However, I&#39;m glad there&#39;s a real PID 1 replacement that is working in NixOS. It&#39;s all built on top of nixpkgs, so it looks like (and the maintainer confirmed) you can just fold this into your existing config and the fix whatever systemd services that weren&#39;t ported. I&#39;ll probably play with this soon. Very cool! #Nix #NixOS #Finix #Linux #Systemd #Finit

Replies (2)

@abmurrow@hachyderm.io 2026-03-29 13:48

As an addition to the last post, the finix project doesn't have any docs yet. It looks like there is an issue describing that need. https://github.com/finix-community/finix/issues/29 This thread is worth a read if you want to understand a little bit about how to get started. Finix is way more DIY than stock nixos, though they share the same package set. It purposefully has few to no defaults, so I suspect it'll feel more like Linux From Scratch than what most of us are used to. But on the plus side, the maintainer has a working personal config they encourage folks to explore. It is flake based and has solutions for most standard operations, plus a bunch of TODOs that are in search of fixing, perhaps. Looks like a simple niri box with a nice set of alternative systems tools and even a musl libc implementation if you want to play around with it. Reading this gave me the inspiration to switch to the limine boot loader, which is fantastic! https://github.com/aanderse/finix-config/ 2/ #Finix #Nix #NixOS #Linux

Open ##1883774
@LovesTha@floss.social 2026-03-28 07:52

@abmurrow intriguing, it does sound fun to try out.

Open ##1883775