NixOS’ influence and importance at pushing Linux forward into the (previously) unexplored landscape of configuring your complete system through a single config file is undeniable. It’s been a wild ride, but it was well worth it.
And although it has only been relatively recently that it has lost its niche status, the recent influx of so-called ‘immutable’ distros springing up like mushrooms is undeniably linked to and inspired by NixOS.
However, unfortunately, while this should have been very exciting times for what’s yet to come, the recent drama surrounding the project has definitely tarnished how the project is perceived.
NixOS’ ideas will definitely live on regardless. But how do you envision NixOS’ own future? Any ETA’s for when this drama will end? Which lessons have we learned (so far) from this drama? Are there any winners as a result of this drama? Could something like this happen to any distro?
In case you’re out of the loop. Though, there’s a lot that has transpired since but which hasn’t been rigorously documented at a single place; like how 4 out of 5 NixOS board members have quit over the last 2 months or so.
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!
Conway’s Law applies in this respect; the mess in governance of Nix has produced a product that reflects that mess. Nix started a beautiful movement but like many first movers, they rarely reap long-term rewards.
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.
That’s true. That’s what I’ve been seeing in places, people just saying to continue on and ignore the drama. And I know I shouldn’t let a group idea/thing dictate whether I use nix but like I was already starting to not like how it seemed like a lot of people were like “write all your stuff in nix (configs, etc)” and I didn’t want to get locked in. Plus I got busy and didn’t feel like tinkering with it. Idk. I was already losing interest in a weird way. I still think immutable/reproducible distros are cool though. I’m now just currently running Guix on top of arch and using aconfmgr to emulate some reproducibility.
I would avoid getting locked in to one platform. Portable and flexible is better
Not to add fuel to the flame by asking, but how’s it been on Guix? I’ve heard Guix does a lot of things better, but also that there’s far less packages and it’s harder on modern hardware.
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.
I haven’t tried running a full Guix system yet but im really liking it as a package manager on top of arch. Yes, hardware support can be iffy, but there is an unofficial channel called nonguix that packages the standard Linux kernel instead of linux-libre, and yes there are less packages but honestly packages are so much more fun to write? I’ve written a few package definitions for both my own use and ive made a request to add one to the official channel. And I feel like, if I really needed something that would not be packaged due to complexity or something, I could try and use flatpak or an appimage or something. I think its definitely worth checking out.
uh, the drama being what it is about people in positions of power blocking efforts to make a welcoming and diverse nixos community, persisting right wing concern trolling, and especially what appears to be maybe a military tech company takeover of nixos, it’s hella understandable people would want to reconsider using this tech on their own hardware and it’s pretty sus to respond to this with ‘ah just drama it’ll blow over’…
Just like the xz backdoor I agree “nothing to see here, move along” seems like bad advice.
It is curious to wonder how much state actors and militaries are involved in weaponizing FOSS culture to purge potential perceived opponents.
For this reason sticking to technological merit and leaving personal beliefs out of FOSS seems wise.
FOSS shouldn’t be state actor’s play thing. When leadership behaves radically and is exclusive it looses my respect & support.
military tech company
wait until they find out where computers and the internet came from. or Tor… GPS, etc etc.
Understandable, maybe to some. But no matter how hard the activist core currently in charge of the moderation team would like me to believe it, not everyone brings political activism to the table on this project. And that’s a good thing. It is still perfectly possible to enjoy working with good tech and build cool stuff without bringing a soap box alongside your laptop.
I believe there is a much larger, silent majority of nix users, contributors and enthusiasts that are not affected by this drama. Here’s a post that resonates with me: https://nrd.sh/blog/nixos-policy-breakdown/
Over 20 years in this technology space, I’ve come to recognize software built on very solid foundational concepts. Nix is one of those. It’s not going anywhere and neither is NixOS. I encourage anyone interested in Nix to read Eelco Dolstra’s thesis: https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf
That’s a thought-provoking article you linked. Thanks. Unfortunately, ideological purity testing is a major problem across all sectors and spans the political spectrum. I was particularly struck by the part of the article that discussed whether “marginalized” status should be considered permanent or temporary.
I’ve worked in social services for a long time. Social activism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, marginalized groups need activists to push their agenda. On the other, activists often adopt that social activism as their primary identity and sometimes even their career. This sets up an incentive structure whereby they don’t actually want to solve the problem of marginalization. Instead, they focus on ideological purity rather than pragmatically solving whatever problems they face.
Sexual orientation, indigenous rights, trans rights, disability rights, race, gender, even recreational drug use, are all marginalization issues that have all received a reasonable degree of social acknowledgement and formal protection.
In all the years I’ve worked in social services, the one issue that never goes away and is never solved or even seriously tackled is the intersection of poverty and mental illness. We are getting better as a society with treatable mental illness like depression and anxiety. However, major mental illness or untreatable/undiagnosed conditions like lack of impulse control that make it hard or impossible to work lead almost inexorably to poverty, addiction, and involvement with the criminal justice system. The activism on that front is itself marginalized because the “fix” isn’t a matter of changing language or mind set, but rather a massive investment of resources. It is easier to sit behind a keyboard and advocate online for nebulous issues like representation than to get out there and make people care about issues that cost real money.
As someone who works with seriously impoverished and mentally ill people, I find the sometimes extreme drama associated with identity politics, representation, pronouns, etc. rather ridiculous. A lot of it is just people trying to externalize their personal issues and force others to acknowledge them, which is unfortunate when it poisons a project or community. It is a form of narcissism, essentially. People who do that should go down to the tent cities, homeless shelters, and jails to get some perspective on just how “marginalized” they actually are and whether publicly exorcising their personal demons is worth destroying the enjoyment of others in a project or community. Their energy could almost certainly be better spent in less narcissistic pursuits.
When I see posts like this and suggest keeping politics out of technical communities, my comment just gets removed by the mods for “transphobia”. I can’t even wrap my head around that one…
Other (multiple) times I’ve had different people respond with “a person’s right to exist is not a political issue, it’s a human rights issue”… as if I was ever talking about anyone’s right to exist.
Then I get the people who say that it’s impossible to not have politics in a community, as eventually someone will come along and do things like the SerenityOS drive-by PR and now any action or inaction by the owner that doesn’t fit their narrative is labeled as some kind of personal attack against them and they call on their friends to go full-on SJW war against the project because someone had an opinion they don’t like.
For you to understand: when you say “keep politics out of tech” that is an explicit political position and you are basically saying “politics for me, but not for you”. Or to put it in different terms: unspoken support for the status quo, is a deeply reactionary political position and you are trying to enforce this by “keeping politics out of tech”.
a person’s right to exist is not a political issue, it’s a human rights issue
The funny part is that you forget or ignore the fact that human rights is a political issue, thus the right to exist is political.
To be fair, one person’s “politics” is another person’s life. When you say “politics” in the sense and context we have here, what does it really mean? It probably means something like “controversial topics related to gender, race, or sexual preference”. When you think of it that way, it is easy to see that excluding discussion of these topics could be seen as excluding or devaluing people with non-mainstream characteristics. An example of that would be the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida, or the US military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy whereby they would allow homosexuals in the military as long as they kept quiet about it.
However, those conversations can be delicate and fraught, so I can see why many people want to keep them to a minimum in certain communities. I have a lot of sympathy for mods that have to moderate such conversations. In general, though, I don’t think it makes sense to remove comments or people unless they are clearly malicious. There are plenty of people for whom topics related to identity are alien or controversial or too painful and personal. Simply calling people “sealions” or “concern trolls” or “transphobic” or whatever and removing them from the conversation is not only wrong, but counter-productive, in my humble opinion. I think the vast majority of people come to conversations with good intentions, but different levels of knowledge, conflict tolerance, and interest in perceived off-topic digressions.
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…
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.
I think we should attack the arguments made and not the people, seems a bit hypocritical IMO.
I attacked his beliefs which is perfectly valid. You should critically examine the motives and biases of people who feed you information.
I am critically examining your responses and I believe that you are making personal attacks.
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.
I had to look up what that word means. It sounds like calling something whataboutism could itself be considered whataboutism. Anyways, I was merely making an observation with no ulterior motive, I was not trying to discredit or shift any focus away from the original argument. Apologies if that wasn’t clear.
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.
Thank you for your input! I would love to read more on this. Do you happen to know a good source wherein Eelco Dolstra’s leadership is discussed (as fair as possible)?
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.
IMO politics have no place in technical discussions. Full disclosure, the last time I said this, my comment was removed for “transphobia”… somehow.
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.
