Determinate Nix

Note: Determinate Nix is not affiliated with the NixOS foundation, and is not an official or approved Nix installer.

Determinate Nix is Determinate Systems’ enterprise‑grade, validated downstream distribution of NixOS/Nix that retains full compatibility with upstream Nix while adding performance‑boosting features such as parallel evaluation and lazy trees.

Setup

Add the input determinate and the module determinate.nixosModules.default to your system flake.nix configuration:

{
  inputs.determinate.url = "https://flakehub.com/f/DeterminateSystems/determinate/*";
  inputs.nixpkgs.url = "nixpkgs/nixos-25.11";
 
  outputs = { determinate, nixpkgs, ... }: {
    nixosConfigurations.my-workstation = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      system = "x86_64-linux";
      modules = [
        # Load the Determinate module
        determinate.nixosModules.default
      ];
    };
  };
}

After that, add the two extra options to the nixos-rebuild command and apply changes:

sudo nixos-rebuild \
  --option extra-substituters https://install.determinate.systems \
  --option extra-trusted-public-keys cache.flakehub.com-3:hJuILl5sVK4iKm86JzgdXW12Y2Hwd5G07qKtHTOcDCM= \
  --flake ... \
  switch