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Is NixOS at the advent of an implosion? | Community inquiry on recent drama (discuss.online)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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NixOS' influence and importance at pushing Linux forward into the (previously) unexplored landscape of configuring your complete system through a single config file is undeniable. It's been a wild ride, but it was well worth it.

And although it has only been relatively recently that it has lost its niche status, the recent influx of so-called 'immutable' distros springing up like mushrooms is undeniably linked to and inspired by NixOS.

However, unfortunately, while this should have been very exciting times for what's yet to come, the recent drama surrounding the project has definitely tarnished how the project is perceived.

NixOS' ideas will definitely live on regardless. But how do you envision NixOS' own future? Any ETA's for when this drama will end? Which lessons have we learned (so far) from this drama? Are there any winners as a result of this drama? Could something like this happen to any distro?

In case you're out of the loop. Though, there's a lot that has transpired since but which hasn't been rigorously documented at a single place; like how 4 out of 5 NixOS board members have quit over the last 2 months or so.

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[–] natecox 59 points 4 months ago (23 children)

It’s probably wise to simply ignore the drama. Open source seems to invite this at the “top” for whatever reason, but for the casual user there is usually little to no impact.

Unless you’re trying to be a top contributor to nix, I would just carry on with normal usage and all the current drama will blow over.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago (12 children)

Idk imo knowing about the drama makes me hesitant to go back, especially since I switched all my development environments from Nix to Guix and I dont want to have three package managers lol Plus the Guix community seems really close knit

Also, happy cake day!

[–] natecox 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

All good reasons to make a decision, I’m not trying to sway anyone in a direction.

I just feel bad when people see drama in a community and wonder if that thing is “safe”. I’ve seen this kind of thing many times before in other communities—PERL, Python, Ruby, Rust, etc—and it never seems to lead to sweeping changes the normal user would notice. It’s pretty safe to assume that day-to-day users of thing can just carry on if they don’t care about the community upset.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's true. That's what I've been seeing in places, people just saying to continue on and ignore the drama. And I know I shouldn't let a group idea/thing dictate whether I use nix but like I was already starting to not like how it seemed like a lot of people were like "write all your stuff in nix (configs, etc)" and I didn't want to get locked in. Plus I got busy and didn't feel like tinkering with it. Idk. I was already losing interest in a weird way. I still think immutable/reproducible distros are cool though. I'm now just currently running Guix on top of arch and using aconfmgr to emulate some reproducibility.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

NixOS is never going mainstream. When the answer to everything is oh just write a package for it. Unless their is a nice gui to edit your configuration file also it well always be niche.

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