finix - a daily-drivable experimental os, featuring finit as pid 1, to explore the NixOS design space

While exploring the NixOS design space I had several topics in mind:

• NixOS evaluation speed regression
• NixOS always imports all modules
• modular services
• decoupling services
• NixNG
• sixos
• nixbsd

Now that finix is running on my laptop I have a working base for experimentation. More to come.

An example of defining a finit service in nix:

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
{
  finit.services.network-manager = {
    description = "network manager service";
    runlevels = "2345";
    conditions = "service/syslogd/ready";
    command = "${pkgs.networkmanager}/bin/NetworkManager -n";
  };
}

finix is currently running on my spare primary laptop:

• with finit instead of systemd as the init system
• with seatd instead of elogind as the seat manager
• with mdevd instead of eudev as the device manager
• using niri as my wayland compositor

finix initially ran:

• in an incus container
• in a nspawn container
• on virtualbox
• with x11

None of the above methods have been attempted in some time.