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NixOS is a good server OS, except when it isn't
- published Ever since I built my first NixOS system (I started by building a custom image to upload on DigitalOcean), I’ve been bothered by one thing: the default installation size is large. To give you an idea, this simple system (using flakes): nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem { system = "x86_64-linux"; modules = [ (nixpkgs.outPath + "/nixos/modules/profiles/minimal.nix") (nixpkgs.outPath + "/nixos/modules/profiles/headless.nix") { fileSystems."/".device = "/dev/sda1"; boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = true; } ]; } ends up taking ~900MB of disk size on my system1! Minimal and headless! When I started working on improving this, I expected the eventual blog post to be very different than what it became, but you can’t win everything in life.
Ever since I built my first NixOS system (I started by building a custom image to upload on DigitalOcean), I’ve been bothered by one thing: the default installation size is large. I knew from my previous experience with NixOS that it didn’t generate lean images by default, so a couple days ago I started looking into this to see if I could fix things, or at least significantly improve them. I think we have all the tools in regular non-docker, non-kubernetes linux to get to a similar outcome, except we won’t need docker or kubernetes or whatever in this new land, thus removing quite a bunch of complexity from the systems we build.
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