# NixOS Plumbers (Previously NixOS/systemd) ## Updates A various bunch of projects that we call "plumbing" are being actively worked on by people mostly residing in `#systemd:nixos.org`. We are a group of people with similar interests and goals that kind of have surprased the usual systemd maintenance but systemd does bind us together. A lot of things are happening but these are projects that are often hard and take a long time. Things that have been going on the past year: * Your regular systemd updates. * A lot of work on "Appliance images", with support for verity and secureboot. * Lanzaboote - enabling secure boot for interactive NixOS installs (https://github.com/nix-community/lanzaboote) * We attended Image-Based Linux Summit, and gave an update and share ideas with with other immutable distros https://lwn.net/Articles/994704/ * We attended https://all-systems-go.io and gave various talks about NixOS with a focus on appliance images. * Work on replacing scripted initrd with systemd-initrd * Modernizing the AWS EC2 images and automating their updates (https://github.com/nixos/amis) * Rewrite of switch-to-configuration to rust (Default in 24.11) * Rewrite of nixos-rebuild * Unification of image builders (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/347275) * Various ongoing work on TPM2 and FIDO2 unlock of LUKS partitions We have some long-standing tickets that have been hard to make progress on due to the scope of what it touches: * [Make systemd-networkd the default networking backend and remove old scripted networking](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/10001). The networkd backend has been ready for a long time and many people use it. However it's still an invasive change and we keep forgetting to pull the trigger * `network-online.target` is pulled in by `multi-user.target` in NixOS. This is non-default behaviour that causes a lot of issues like https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/247608. However it has been hard to get the refactor to fix this through as it touches *everything* https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/283818 ## Observations The work on what basically is the core of NixOS is currently rather organic and anarchistic. This isn't a problem per se, but we do notice that some larger invasive changes seem to take very long to pull off. If people have ideas how we can better coordinate such things it would be nice to hear.