Installing Vivado on NixOS
An attempt to wrangle the bumbling mess that is Xilinx's software

This note started out in May 2025, when I first tried to install Vivado on my NixOS machine. I'd tried all sorts of random things. Below you will see some bullet points from the original draft of this post, which was intended to be much longer, as a triumphant victory after wrangling the mess of scripts and dependencies that is Xilinx packaging.

After about 4 days of agony I stumbled upon this repo for porting Xilinx to Nix… even the author had given up and switched to Ubuntu! By his recommendation I threw in the towel and created a distrobox container for my Vivado install, which has worked flawlessly, carrying me through synthesis of fairly large designs for the VCU118 during my chip tapeout. I'll write about that experience in the future (I hope), but in the meantime the moral of the story is:

NixOS is pretty cool, until you use EDA software, at which point you might as well just use Ubuntu.

← Back to Ramblings | Written: 04/18/2026