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- Hacker News
- Sorry guys, it's my fault. Every time I try to get into nix, there's a new community meltdown. I just installed NixOS yesterday ...by looperhacks
- Hopefully a new governance structure will emerge and allow for a better path forward.
As a layman who has only used AI to package a couple things on NixOS for personal use, I would think that LLM agents are perfect for taking over most of the nixpkgs workflow.
by Eueudhsbsj32 - Ah, yearly I hate/love nix post..
I tell you what. Ever since I migrated my dev workflow to nix package manager (and home manager for system depa), my life became simpler like 10 times
I can configure any macos machine in like 20 mins (I use Determinate)
by garn810 - I dunno about all this hullabaloo. I'm at https://nix.vegas/ having fun and using Nix.by setheron
- After being a heavy user of NixOS, I quit using it due to the communities instability, I don't trust it.by soupbowl
- What alternative have you moved on to?by aroman
- In my mind Nix is too strong of an idea and once this community finally self-immolates, someone else is going to pick it up (maybe Determinate) and it'll continue on.
- I've been a user for many years, and have 100+ PRs, but I'm not really a part of the community, so these posts are the only drama I see.
The PRs keep rolling and things keep improving!
If someone wants to be a part of the community, I can see why this might dissuade people though.
by farfatched - Can someone explain the ramifications of this to those of us not informed.
I’m in the process of about to deploy Nixos to server workloads, but am now hesitant because I don’t understand these ramifications.
by alberth - If you want to trust your servers to a product of this community, that is your call.
Just note that the community is unstable and prone to civil wars.
by Alien1Being - the thing being disbanded is less than a year oldby whateveracct
- This was a governance structure that began ~1 year ago. Nix is 23 years old, so it won't be dying or going away due to this. But it is sad to see two extremely valuable contributors leave the project due to burn out.
Nix and NixOS are two of the most revolutionary pieces of software in my experience. Hopefully Nix finds a governance structure worth of it.
- I’m not saying it’s decisively correlated, or anything on its own, but there sure are a lot of anime avatars in this community.by vehemenz
- silly. without the anime avatars and the furries nix is dead in the water.by undeveloper
- When I did nix, I joked that everyone I met in the community was either a queer furry kayaker or a military-industrial Terminator dev, with no in-between.by KingMob
- Nix and NixOS probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the anime pfps :)by Cyph0n
- I really don't think these issues are necessarily "systemic" in the sense that they've been ongoing for the last decade. I _was_ a long-time contributor until about two years ago when certain actors came into the community and started making a bunch of unnecessary drama. Since then I've seen some long-time friends in the community either slowly drop out or simply get ran out by a mob with pitch forks.by aliasxneo
- Many such cases across all aspects of society.by indy
- It is a systemic issue, though, when the system enables these certain actors to remain in position and cause the community to break apart like it’s doing.
- Nix package manager: correctly resolves dependency hell for your entire OS.
Nix governance: still hasn't resolved dependency hell for humans apparently.
by ishanz - For a certain definition of "correctly" (namely: it doesn't, it just does what containers do and ships unique versions for every package).by XorNot
- but the dependency hell for human is inherently politicalby stevefan1999
- There was a sweet spot in like 2024 when it seemed like everything was possible with Nix, but now it seems like everything “experimental” is permanently so (like flakes), packages I care about are not as fresh as I want, I have no mental recall for Nix commands…
Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something.
Reminds me of Bazel, in the way that it gets adopted by companies with developer support teams (because it solves real problems) but feels frustrating for us ordinary folk. Nixpkgs is kind of a critical part of “ordinary folk” and with the core team disbanding, I feel like my personal moves away from Nix (for projects) are proving correct.
by klodolph - Flakes must drop the "experimental" moniker and be officially supported by Nix. It may not be perfect, but it has been widely adopted.
- Is your company paying anyone to develop nix?by noosphr
- Agents are getting pretty good at Nix. I think it has sufficient critical mass that it'll be fine.by CuriouslyC
- This resonates with me as well. I was really into using Nix for awhile but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for a solo dev.by talentedcoin
- Is it really that complicated? I personally use direnv with nix to have per-project dependency versions installed automatically, and I’ve never had too much trouble. I know that the flake.nix files can become somewhat complicated, but mine have been pretty simple thus far.
- > Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something.
Why doesn't your company fund development of nix and its associated ecosystem?
- Can you share more about what made you move away?
I’ve been running a NixOS based homelab for awhile now with 5 physical hosts and about 30 NixOS containers/VMs in an Incus cluster and I can’t imagine moving away from my central Nix repo and ability to rebuild/upgrade the entire fleet in one command and feel confident that things will work.
While I’m concerned about the disbanding, it would take quite a lot to make me look elsewhere, and there’s enough critical mass that I feel confident others will step up.
by haswell