Comparisons to Existing NixOS Tools

nh

nh is a more popular application in this realm, perhaps because it looked prettier due to the earlier nix-output-monitor and nvd integration, and is significantly older than nixos-cli.

However, I prefer to keep the focus on NixOS here, while nh tries to be a unified rebuild + switch manager for multiple OSes. That's the biggest difference.

nixos-cli also has more features than nh for NixOS-based machines, so that's a plus.

In the future, I may want to write similar CLIs to nixos-cli as replacements for the current darwin-rebuild and home-manager scripts, but this is purely imaginative for the time being. My personal belief is that these are fundamentally separate projects with vaguely similar, but disparate concerns, and in my opinion, should be kept that way.

nixos-rebuild-ng + switch-to-configuration-ng

The big differences:

• They mimic the existing nixos-rebuild.sh project 1:1 when it comes to features
• They're two separate projects still written in two separate languages
• They are developed in the nixpkgs tree, so it's harder to track progress

nixos-cli intends to go much further than these. The interface is much more approachable, and the development is done out-of-tree, which makes it easier to separate concerns.

Also, the plan in the future is to have a nixos activate command that is a self-contained drop-in replacement for switch-to-configuration functionality, rather than being two separate projects. The progress for this is tracked in this GitHub issue.

Also, the nixos-rebuild-ng project is written in Python, which would require a Python runtime as a builtin dependency for base NixOS systems with it, while nixos-cli only requires the Go compiler.