What even is celun?
It's a small Nix-based "extremely embedded" Linux toy distribution.
At the moment the goal is not to replace Nixpkgs, not even for embedded use cases.
The main goal here is to play around with designs that wouldn't be accepted in Nixpkgs as they are. In addition, this also serves as a showcase of how a non-NixOS distribution can be made while still relying on Nixpkgs.
This is entirely a learning exercise, for the author, and anyone else reading this.
Hopefully some of these experiments can graduate into more "proper" projects as they become mature :).
Devices are used to describe as much as relevant about a hardware target. These properties are used by default to maximally customize the built system.
Hardware options are described in modules/hardware. These are expected to
be used by devices to describe themselves. Some options may be unused.
This smells like Mobile NixOS, no? Yes it does! But this factors out the hardware into an even more generic overview. I want to stretch the use case even further than it is in Mobile NixOS.
Not in most of the use cases where it shines! And even for those other cases it might still be desirable to use NixOS and all its semantics.
The only segment I envision this project doing better than NixOS is for extremely embedded Linux, where most of the NixOS semantics won't matter. And yet, it should be possible to use NixOS in most of those cases. Please do if it works for you!
Note that this is not using NixOS. It uses the modules system, like NixOS does, but the modules are mostly entirely new and have different semantics.
No! This uses and leverages Nixpkgs! Nixpkgs has years upon years of accumulated knowledge about building software for Linux systems. It would be a shame to entirely throw it away!
For now, not many reasons. You'd be an early adopter and probably need to stamp down your own path with celun.
With that said, if you think celun is something you want to use, get in touch, collaboration does wonders! Your ideas and use cases may influence the initial design of celun greatly!