Using Nix as a Yocto Alternative
Quoting: Using Nix as a Yocto Alternative - KDAB —
Today we take a look at Nix as an alternative to Yocto and buildroot. Nix is a purely functional language that fits all of the above criteria perfectly. The project started as a PhD thesis for purely functional software deployment and has been around for over 20 years already. In the last few years, it has gained a lot of popularity in the Server and Desktop Linux scene, due to its ability to configure an entire system and solve complex packaging-related use cases in a declarative fashion.
In the embedded scene, Nix is not yet as popular, but there have already been success stories of Nix being used as an alternative to Yocto. And with the vast collection of over 80,000 officially maintained packages in the nixpkgs repo (this is more than all official packages of Debian and Arch Linux combined), Nix certainly has an edge over the competition, as most software stacks are already packaged. For most common hardware you will also find an overlay of hardware-specific quirks in the nixos-hardware repository. However, since the user demographic of Nix is slightly different at the moment, for more obscure embedded platforms you are still much more likely to find an OpenEmbedded layer.