When NixOS, the distro built on the Nix package manager, surveyed its community in 2024, 52% of its more than 2,000 respondents were from Europe, and 55% ran NixOS on home servers. 

Only a smattering of users run NixOS in production. SAP collaborated on a project using OpenStack in NixOS and Accenture has a repo from 2022 using a Nix DataProfiler.

But, up until now, NixOS has been mostly thought of as a heavily forked, highly visible, hobbyist distro loved by European users.

France may be about to change that.

See also: France’s shift from US technology starts with 250 "DINUM" machines and NixOS

France's Direction interministérielle du numérique (DINUM) has put 40 sysadmins on NixOS machines as part of its nascent project to migrate all of its 250 workstations away from Windows.

That's part of an ambitious plan to minimise dependencies on US tech.

The French police force is a longstanding Ubuntu shop, and its Gedbuntu is thought to be the largest Linux-on-desktop deployments in the EU public sector. 

But DINUM wanted standardised deployment at scale, and that's where NixOS shines. 

Atomic as an outcome

NixOS is attractive in the public sector because it is atomic, but true believers will tell you that is underselling it.

The distro’s core proposition is a declarative, reproducible system model built on the Nix package manager, with atomic-style upgrades as a by-product.

Instead of mutating a live system in place, NixOS builds complete system generations from configuration and switches between them, giving straightforward rollback, and a tighter grip on drift across environments.

There are two distinct ways in which NixOS is special, said Jonas Chevalier from Numtide, a consultancy that has long offered commercial support for NixOS, and which builds sovereign stacks on top of it: sandboxing by default, and vertical integration.

"On the sandboxing side, the language itself guarantees that all the dependencies are properly described, providing SLSA lvl3 [a software supply chain standard] out of the gate while other distributions are typically struggling. Software supply chain and provenance are becoming increasingly relevant subjects," Chevalier told The Stack.

"On the vertical integration side, Nix is structuring itself as a tree instead of flat snapshots. This makes it easy to mix and match software for the needs of your organization. Where other distributions typically have a whole process to bake new images, test and integrate, with Nix this is one function call away."

Implementers say that patching and fixing is unbelievably fast on Nix compared to just about any other desktop, and turnaround time is increasingly important.

European by default

NixOS is also quintessentially European – which may be nearly as important as its technical characteristics in projects driven by sovereignty.

NixOS came out of Delft university in the Netherlands, and the foundation is incorporated in the Netherlands. Its entire structure remains heavily biased towards Europe, perhaps overly so.

"Nowadays, while we really value our European roots, specially in the context of increasing the sovereignty of our infrastructure, we do have an eye towards increasing the representation of the rest of the world, which might include hosting multiple official NixCon, perhaps in multiple parts of Europe to increase attendance, and help support organisers across the world with funding pizza and other hacking essentials for their meetups," said Christina Sørensen, a long-time NixOS maintainer, and a steering committee member since November.

See also: France to swap Windows for Linux across government as it ramps up sovereignty drive

Sørensen is Danish, and has a history working in the public sector, where she says NixOS is not entirely unknown, at least in Europe.

"It's typically just not something people speak loudly about, but NixOS has been quietly spreading to places that need the operational stability, and the raw leverage that NixOS affords infrastructure teams to achieve independence from the cloud (or coexist with it if they so desire)," she told The Stack.

Moderation fight

NixOS has a rock-solid technical reputation, but its recent governance troubles may give enterprise-scale adopters pause, or reason to look at some of its forks.

In September, a majority of Nix moderators resigned "in protest of the Steering Committee’s ongoing pattern of attempting to interfere with moderation team operation, membership and specific moderation decisions."

Neither the root cause (a clash between long-serving community technocrats and relatively newly elected overseers) nor the result (a scramble of emergency meetings and interim structures, with some ongoing bad blood between individuals) was exactly new in the open source space.

See also: “We want it back” - Synadia tries to claw NATS back from a shocked CNCF

But there is little sign that NixOS suffered any damage on a technical level, and the blip in its reputation seems to have been exactly that: a short-lived dip.

"What matters is that the community is still around, live and kicking," said Numtide's Chevalier, and does not seem to have scared off enterprise-type adopters.

"We're also seeing coalitions of enterprise users emerge that provide a good counter force and helps get the enterprise's needs represented. NixOS is a rare project where both the grassroots community, and companies are meeting together.

LLM enablement

Nix is a functional, lazy, declarative language that is great for precise build descriptions. It is also more than a little daunting, even some of its most enthusiastic users will tell you.

Expertise in languages such as Python or C will only take you so far, with Nix's unique concepts such as purity and derivations, and the learning curve is steep.

Not too long ago, that was a barrier to institutional adoption, with an up-front time investment required before new developers would be in a position to even properly evaluate the prospect of using NixOS in complex environments.

That, however, is changing. LLMs capable of writing Nix code has caused an influx of new users, said Chevalier, who are discovering that Nix is a good fit for agentic work. 

"Both because it reduces the learning curve, but also because the fundamental declarative and sandboxing properties of Nix are sorely needed. Instead of having the agents change the systems directly, we can have agents write the Nix code, that declares the desired state of systems. And that is a lot safer paired with NixOS's automated rollback system."

Fork and feedback

The brands visible as France's DINUM unit adopts Linux will likely be the Sécurix flavour and the Bureautix stack of office tools on top of it, complete with jokes about indomitable Gauls by anyone who has ever seen an Asterix comic. 

A lack of credit does not seem to bother most of the NixOS community,, and the new fork should feed back to the main branch in more than one way.

"I don't think the box needs to say NixOS for the fundamentals we bring, even if forked, to be undeniable," steering committee member Sørensen told The Stack.

"My hope is that we'll see the learnings of these distributions trickle back into the project, and if nothing else, I've seen many cases of people trying out an offshoot only to later come looking for the 'real thing'."

Sécurix has a very specific roadmap geared around hardening and centralised management of components such as secure boot keys, which have not featured as high priority in NixOS itself.

In January, the NixOS Foundation announced a partnership with Framework, the six-year-old desktop and laptop company that argues it can fix the consumer electronics space by making both hardware and software open to users at the most fundamental level. 

Ubuntu, Fedora, and Bazzite all get higher billing when Framework shoppers choose between Windows and "none" configuration, but NixOS has long been notably popular among its buyers.

Various vendors and consultancies are adding enterprise-grade support, with SLAs, managed builds, and UX-wrappers to NIxOS, cutting down on the complexity of big rollouts. 

Meanwhile, DINUM has said that by the end of northern-hemisphere summer, it will offer a structured roadmap for French ministries to move, en mass, to Linux.

The NixOS community thinks it has chosen the right distro to get it done.

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