this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] Shareni 61 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

Dude still hasn't decided where to host the repo. It's not an alternative, guix is...

[–] starman 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Aux is more similar to Nix, than Guix is.

Guix uses the same concepts, but still is very different.

[–] Shareni 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What a horrible name. I literally had to search for "aux nix" to find a Reddit post mentioning the URL. Every other search term combination was giving me results for ps aux.

[–] onlinepersona 8 points 6 months ago (6 children)

Same. Short it nice, but it has to be unique and memorable too. Aux is an already existing word.

Things that don't exist yet

  • Lunix - sounds like linux and nix just with i and u swapped
  • Originix - very close to https://orignix.com/ but not the same
  • Nunix - New Nix
  • Froxin - Jumble of fork + nix
  • Apenix - Apex of nix
  • Nirofs - Nix Is a Read Only FileSystem

Suprisingly already exist

  • Nuxor - Lindt Nuxor is a chocolate
  • Aunix - auxiliary nix - https://www.aunixinternational.com/ already exists though
  • XiniX - a mirror of nix (xinix.nl exists though)
  • Lixin - shit this also exists as a brand
  • Fornix - fork + nix - is part of our brain
  • nixzen - spanish company
  • zenix - Zenith of nix - another spanish company?
  • Apaux - Apex of auxiliary nix - surprisingly is a band
  • Araknix - some toy
  • naaix - sounds like nice - is a damn boat company

Probably some LLM could come up with something too given a good prompt.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] Shareni 6 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I vote for nunix, it's the only one I'd remember easily.

Fornix sounds surprisingly sexual.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Apenix

And this sounds like nix for apes 🐵

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hopefully it is delay due to setting up self-hosted options. I would support it if I didn’t have to use Microsoft GitHub—Nixpkgs is the reason my account hasn’t been deactivated.

[–] starman 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

I'm out of the loop, what's the issue with the current Nixos maintainers?

[–] [email protected] 81 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

Here's a tl;dr : https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained

If you're looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:

  • Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power
  • Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn't like
  • Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority
  • This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community
  • Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company's community as a substitute for Nix community

And a not too long read : https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-04-27-nix-internal-crisis.html

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Not very clear to me that this is any more valuable than OG NixOS.

This sounds a lot like the forgejo vs gitea fork. I love the forgejo people but I am yet to see a sufficient differentiator.

[–] moonpiedumplings 37 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

I dunno, some of these are a pretty big deal, in particular:

Gitea repeatedly makes choices that leave Gitea admins exposed to known vulnerabilities during extended periods of time. For instance Gitea spent resources to undergo a SOC2 security audit for its SaaS offering while critical vulnerabilities demanded a new release. Advance notice of security releases is for customers only.

Gitea is developed on github, whereas forgejo is developed on and by codeberg, who use it as their main forge (also mentioned on that page). Someone dogfooding gives me more confidence in the software.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Tbf most of gitea is hosted on gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

Just not the main repo because of a blocking issue (which makes the above link pretty annoying)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I think the reason is because apparently a lot of people are unhappy with a deal Nix inked apparently with a company that does business with the US' Immigrations and Customs

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They were still pulling in mainline Gitea changes while introducing their own stuff last I checked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Pulling in mainline gitea changes, I did see. But I didn't see any notable differences from gitea. Do you know of any?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Forgejo is working on federation. That is the big item.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Nothing concrete from what I can tell. Becoming a hard fork is relatively recent though (mid-November of last year, roughly).

As a side note, I understand why Gitea and Forgejo went for a "copy GitHub Actions" approach to their CI, but man do I wish more self-hosted repo software tried to copy Drone/Woodpecker instead. Iterative containers in the pipeline is such a smoother build experience, and it kind of sucks that Gitness is the only one doing it (that I know of).

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

There's plenty, but I do not wish to hijack this thread, so... have a look at the Forgejo 7.0 release notes, the PRs it links to along notable features (and a boatload of bugfixes, many of which aren't in Gitea). Then compare when (and if) similar features or fixes were implemented in Gitea.

The major difference (apart from governance, and on a technical level) between Gitea and Forgejo is that Forgejo cherry picks from Gitea weekly (being a hard fork doesn't mean all ties are severed, it means that development happens independently). Gitea does not cherry pick from Forgejo. They could, the license permits it, and it even permits sublicensing, so it's not an obstacle for Gitea Cloud or Gitea EE, either. They just don't.

[–] SuperFola 2 points 6 months ago

Last time I checked they were working on forgejo runners / actions!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (3 children)

NixOS forked

Sounds like it broke and you wanted to f-bomb it in the Good Place.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

Forking shirtballs!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

Wait, why can't I say fork?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

That's fscked

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

Was waiting for that to happen

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Is Guix a cleaner base for a NixOS alternative ?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

They are very diverged projects, but share the same philosophy. The Nix packages themselves aren't the problem, its the organization backing them. So this fork is attempting to create better governance and organization, so that the good underlying tech can keep going and progress.

For example, Flakes have been held back from truly flourishing because the governing body has purposefully held back changes to those systems for nontechnical problems, but rather political conflicts with their proprietary offerings.

Think of the fork the same way we had the Alma/Rocky forks off of CentOS. Its political rather than technical, so keeping the same base tech helps adoption. Over time we can improve or replace parts of the ecosystem as the needs of this new project grow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Sadly no AFAIK, even ignoring the licensing issues.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I think so. The language (Scheme) is a lot more logical to me, and the higher focus on reproducibility in the main channel compared to Nix (Guix can be bootstrapped from a tiny binary seed) is a draw for me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I would love to host a mirror of the ecosystem once the fork is underway. I made a small attempt a little while ago to create a mirror of the Nix repos but the documentation on how to set it up was lacking. Hosting a Debian mirror is relatively easy, Nix appeared quite a bit more obfuscated.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Nice. I guess there will be more news on their Mastodon account or their website at some point : https://hachyderm.io/@jakehamilton/112349915028065428

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I was just thinking about switching to Nix, but I have no idea what to choose now.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

I disagree with @[email protected] (sorry!) - the biggest issue right now is that package maintainers are leaving in droves - at least 15 contributors left a few days ago, a number which has likely increased these past few days - and will continue to increase. I think the only people left will be the ones who support Eelco and the toxic culture brewed by him.

What this means is that you risk your packages getting out of date, including slow delivery of security updates (which was already an increasing concern, due to the way the Nixpkgs build system worked). Worst case scenario, some (many?) packages may never even get an update.

So now's definitely NOT a good time to switch, and in fact I'd also urge existing users to look at other distros, at least temporarily until this whole thing settles down.

[–] Shareni 8 points 6 months ago

I disagree with @[email protected] (sorry!)

Don't say sorry for making an actual argument, or are you some Canadian lol?

at least 15 contributors left a few days ago

According to this list there are 3470 maintainers. Were those 15 doing so much work to warrant calling it the end of days?

What this means is that you risk your packages getting out of date, including slow delivery of security updates

A possible delay for some package updates vs certainly outdated packages in my native Debian. Not really a choice IMO

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[–] Shareni 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Just use Nix and see where the drama goes in a year. I'm guessing your configs will be fully compatible or only require minimal changes, if the forks survive that long in the first place.

I'd suggest learning nix, flakes, and home-manager before going anywhere close to NixOS. This should help you out

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

You should learn the nix lang, flakes, zero to nix, etc and try not to get bogged down in the Nix/Aux stuff. Be prepared to wait for things to settle down on that side.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Ok, but why? Forking generally means you are unhappy with something but no one is saying what.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

There's been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I'm honestly not sure of the details but it's ptesumably less about the software than the people.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

This looks good, I'll switch over as soon as they decided on a hoster. I don't have too much experience working in open source projects, but I'll try to contribute what I can

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Nice! I'm really looking forward to this. I've been playing with nix for a while, but there were some things that prevented me from seriously adopt it (e.g. flakes are still considered experimental, but they are widely used).

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