The Nixpkgs core team has unfortunately decided to disband. We’re proud to have had the opportunity to lead by example in bottom‐up, consensus‐focused governance for Nixpkgs, and of our achievements over the past 10 months, including reforming the committer delegation process and onboarding 19 new committers, empowering maintainers by extending the merge bot, re‐establishing contact with GitHub and securing the sponsored Enterprise Cloud upgrade, helping triage GHSA-67f2-674w-6g63 and track the...

TL;DR: Two of the most nicest, most technically proficient people you know just got burnt out from contributing to their operating system and this is just another example of NixOS being poorly maintained.

A year since I divested from NixOS and nothing really has changed. The “flakes” design is still a garbage abstraction invented by a neo-nazi to sell to Peter Thiel and Co. The Nix language has not evolved in any meaningful way (nixpkgs is still the load bearing peg).

Nixpkgs has reached over 1 million commits and is pushing what Git can scale to and is now entirely dependent on a Microsoft GitHub enterprise subscription and a Amazon AWS S3 credits for petabytes of CI/CD.

The community still contains active MIC fascists in leadership roles alongside :votevote Europeans. empoc perspectives are treated as community fracturing.

The nix derivations abstractions has not truly caught on (due to it not even being better than containers resource wise) and flakes only makes this worse with unversioned commit hashes serving as “determinism” and “reproducibility” which have become buzzwords at this point.

I only expect this to get worse and worse as Determinate Systems (MIC ghoul company) takes over and nixpkgs collapses as an independent entity.

BTW they haven’t decided on a AI/LLM policy because the steering committee and the nixpkgs core team can’t agree or communicate on anything, which basically means NixOS is going to be a AI hype train project if you enjoy that.

  • gayspacemarxist [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    With nix, I can install the full clone in one shot.

    I think the benefits of Nix appear when you have enough machines where ansible would make sense. You can run migrations on activation, basically manage the entire machine lifecycle using a single config interface that statically manages all the subsystems.

    Maybe its a matter of taste, but I’m personally able to safely manage a lot more complexity using nix than I ever could using containers et al. I find the iteration process is a lot faster because I can write in a bunch of assertions about the schema that is projected down into the real configs. I can run these test scenarios over and over on my local machine so when I finally push it generally works on the first try.