NixOS is an amazing operating system. NixOS is a terrible community.
- No hosting sovereignty. The NixOS code repositories are entirely reliant on Microsoft GitHub for both hosting and compute and recently got a github enterprise grant, so when Microsoft eventually sanctions the global south there will be no nixos anymore outside of the imperial core.
- incredibly wasteful, NixOS hosts petabytes upon petabytes of binary packages with yearly costs only covered by again, grants by AWS because the entire cache is hosted on AWS.
- the reason this waste is created is because there is no community organization on topics such as content - addressed derivations and de-facto dictatorships of terrible ideas like nix flakes.
- nix flakes are an objectively terrible format created by a neo Nazi to sell to american terrorist organizations like anduril. It basically is a shitty npm slop lock file that just brute forces everything by commit sha and doesnt actually align with what Nixpkgs does which are stable releases and rolling releases. Anyone who thinks flakes are good doesnt actually understand nix and is probably a Nazi because the only people who defend flakes are out of touch hype bros and Nazis.
- community has been taken over by centrist libs and palantir worshippers. Either get online microagressions by people who want to build missiles to kill Russia and Iran or get tut-tutted by euro libs who think the same thing but feel embarrassed by the former group.
Use Guix, they are the only successor to the Nix idea, of course unless you are a bay area techbro who has fuck you levels of bandwidths and SSD writes when you checkout 100 different flakes with 100 different nixpkgs.
I use fedora, which despite literally being a community backed by IBMs interest at least doesnt force me to log onto github dot com and inject me with weapons grade copium of going mainstream.
This person is cool though, I watch their stuff because the linux hobbyist space is dominated by a cis white sausage fest.
Second Fedora. The atomics are close enough to Nix style, and while it is maintained by Red Hat/RHEL, I don’t think the community versions are as deeply dependent on industrial “partnerships” as Nix is.
In what way is it similar to NixOS?
The atomics are immutable, so you have to layer the packages on your base image. It’s not fully the same as NixOS, but it’s functionally similar since the OS is imaged every time you install something.
first time I’ve been excited about an operating system in… decades? it is hella cool
I just wish they didn’t have the Palantir connection
Wait wait wait what?
Their community is heavily infiltrated by Anduril and Palantir and they get a lot of funding/core dev work from them.
Those companies are also massively hiring Nix developers through the community since they use Nix to run all their surveillance and weapon systems internally.
is any tech free from sin
:stallman-shining: The GPL will never die
Stallman just proves my point
Ehh, fair. The GPL and copy left is still good though. Plus I’d take his weird shit over literal genocide manufacturers
wait, palantir too? i knew about anduril but this is new. maybe calling it the genocider os was not a bad idea
I believe so? May be mistaken. I know that there’s a non-insignificant overlap between the Lord of the Rings genocide factories.
try guix. very similar ideas but they actually care about freedom and is an actual community effort
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I’ve been using NixOS for a couple years, but I’m planning to drop it soon. As a vimmer, I find it far to convoluted to try and get application such as neovim, which manage their own dependencies/plugins to work correctly. Additionally, if I update my system and this breaks a single application, I’m left with the options to either rollback and wait for a fix, or use complex voodoo magic to try and freeze the version of that package while upgrading everything else.
I’ve been running Gentoo on my laptop and it’s been solid so I might switch to that. Upgrading can be pretty slow with having to compile everything locally though so I’m still not sure.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
It’s in many ways a brilliant distro but also some absolutely asinine design choices and very frustrating fail cases and steep learning curve.







