This is a repository that aims to concisely explain the issues in Nix community - KFearsoff/nix-drama-explainedGitHub
the recent influx of so-called 'immutable' distros springing up like mushrooms is undeniably linked to and inspired by NixOS.
This is the usual (only?) solution - the idea forks or inspires a different community to take it further.
There's usually no fixing a toxic person / community in either real life or online.
My take on it is that the creator of Nix was very good technically but was not a good BDFL, and that was the root of the problem. He didn't do a good job of politicking, stepped down, and now Nix is going through a bit of interregnum. I don't think it's likely to fail overall though, nixpkgs is too valuable of a resource to just get abandoned. I expect the board seats will be filled by people that know how to politick, and things will continue on after that.
Lessons learned is being a BDFL is hard. IMO Eelco Dolstra failed because he had opinions about things like Anduril sponsorship and flakes, and didn't just declare "This is the way things are going to be, take it or leave it". People got really pissed off because there wasn't a clear message or transparency, which resulted in lots of guessing.
What you call politics (US political "issues") and politicking (the act of seeking and organizing power or influence) are different things.
Maybe US political issues have no spot in tech but politics are a part of being human.
Unfortunately there isn't one easy source that I've found. This is based on reading the stuff you linked to, as well as discourse/matrix discussions linked to from those sources. I compare it mentally to Guido van Rossum as BDFL of Python (though not any longer). He did a much better job of communicating expectations, like here
It made some people unhappy that there was no Python 2.8, but everybody knew what was happening. The core Python team also wasn't surprised by that announcement, unlike with stuff like Anduril or flakes for the nix devs.
There was also a failure to communicate with stuff like the PR that would switch to Meson. The PR author should have known if Eelco broadly agreed with it before opening it. If there was a process that the PR author just ignored, the PR should have been closed with "Follow this process and try again". That process can be as simple as "See if Eelco likes it", since he was BDFL, but the process needs to be very clear to everyone.
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.
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!
I'm not the op, but I've been using guix for several months on a new fairly top of the line desktop PC and it's going great. I've been able to play steam games and set up my dev environment with basically no issues.
The catch is you need to use non-official repositories (i.e. https://github.com/nonguix/nonguix) to use the non-libre kernel and other software not on the official channel.
There's also this nice little search engine - https://toys.whereis.みんな/ - where you can look for packages from other repos (or channels as they are called in guix).
I use Nix on my macos work laptop to set up my dev environment, but I definitely prefer guix so far, mostly due to the it being configured in guile over the weird nix language. The biggest advantage I see of Nix is that it has a bit more features and lots more packages.
I am a pretty hardcore emacs user and lisp lover though, so ymmv.
Nonguix mirror – pull requests ignored, please use upstream for that - nonguix/nonguixGitHub
https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
They literally have this as the link in all their docs so I am not sure why you would choose the mirror on the fully-proprietary, Microsoft-owned code forge.
Guix channel for packages that can't be included upstream. Please do NOT promote or refer to this repository on any official Guix communication channels.GitLab
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.
military tech company
wait until they find out where computers and the internet came from. or Tor... GPS, etc etc.
You should know that the guy you cited in the second link, Srid, is a well-known right-wing shit-stirrer who is banned from basically all NixOS spaces because he cannot peacefully coexist. He literally gets up day after day with the seemingly sole purpose of fueling drama and causing problems. Don't take his opinion at face value, he wants to see the project burn down and this colors his interpretation of events.
NixOS is going through a rocky moment for sure, but there's no indication it will implode currently.
He literally gets up day after day with the seemingly sole purpose of fueling drama and causing problems
That's funny because I feel like that's exactly what all these self-proclaimed "gender terrorist" SJWs are doing to projects in the first place.
Full Disk Encryption is planned to be introduced in the forthcoming release candidate of the Aeon Desktop to enhance data security for its users. The feature...openSUSE News
In September the NixOS constitutional assembly should finish their work, and the community will be able to elect governance. I'm guessing that's when the drama will start getting resolved.
In the meantime, there are multiple maintainers that have left because of the drama - which is more troublesome than the board members leaving - but nixpkgs has a LOT of maintainers, and there are new ones joining all the time. It's still healthy and won't implode so quickly.
Is Nix really so important to the world that it needs a constitutional assembly, a board of directors, and general elections?
I always gathered that it was a niche project within the niche of Linux distro projects.
Is it a bunch of people playing out a company governance fantasy or is it actually a large, well valued company? I think that the vast majority of people wouldn't even be able to make an informed voting decision.
I am also quite out of the loop I feel...