Installing Every NixOS Package

Anthony Wang — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:15:56 -0500

Four years ago, I installed every Arch Linux package (and someone else tried the same crazy experiment with Alpine Linux). But did I really accomplish my goal? Well… I slightly cheated, since I only installed non-conflicting packages rather than literally every single Arch package. Besides, installing conflicting packages would overwrite one package’s files with the other’s, so they wouldn’t really both be installed.

The solution, as with any Linux problem, is NixOS. With NixOS, conflicting packages or even multiple versions of the same package can coexist in the Nix store, which are then activated into your environment via symlinks, hacked together with some nasty Bash and Perl scripts. Hooray for purely functional package management! Even better, search.nixos.org boasts a total of more than 120000 packages, nearly 10 times the measly 12232 packages that I installed in my Arch experiment.

RNG and Cosine in Nix

Anthony Wang — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 12:56:26 -0400

NixOS is an immutable, atomic Linux distribution with a declarative and reproducible configuration and packaging system using the purely functional, lazily evaluated, dynamically typed Nix programming language.

Kublai: AAAAAAHHH too many buzzwords, what does that all mean???

Glad you asked! Basically, in NixOS, you can configure your entire system using a configuration.nix file and NixOS will magically (using a bunch of Bash scripts) figure out what needs to be installed and how to do it. For instance, if you want to enable Firefox, you’d add programs.firefox.enable = true; to your configuration.nix. Easy as that.

Nix on Unnamed Website

Installing Every NixOS Package

RNG and Cosine in Nix