Is it possible to grow a Nix (the package manager, not nixos the distro) based linux system from scratch? More specifically:
AFAIK Nix provides infrastructural packages like glibc, gcc, linux kernel, etc. Does that mean one won't need to build these manually, like in LFS?
Nixos itself uses systemd, but I am aware of not-os, which is based on runit. How much do nixpkg packages depend on systemd?
Nixos seems to support grub as bootloader only. Can one use EFI-stub boot, together with dracut or hand-rolled initcpio, with Nix?
If you are curious, this is why:
I like gentoo's USE flags, but get somewhat tired of gentoo's frequent dependency hell and world re-compiling (especially in terms of python versioning, though that's not gentoo's fault essentially lol). So I am seeking a package manager that has decent support for both source-based and binary packages, and with simpler dependency handling. I have wandered between Arch (Artix) and Void, but in both case one have to manage source packages manually. At last I found Nix a perfect fit.
Purely for fun and aesthetic reasons, I would like to try a non-systemd distro.
I prefer EFI-stub.
I use ZFS as the root filesystem, which needs special initcpio.