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The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
- soupbowl 2mo agoAfter being a heavy user of NixOS, I quit using it due to the communities instability, I don't trust it.
- aroman 2mo agoWhat alternative have you moved on to?
- talentedcoin 2mo agoI suggest giving Bazzite a try
- aroman 2mo agoI tried Fedora Silverblue and I found its notion/implementation of immutability fairly frustrating. It’s actually the reason I went to nixOS. It seemed to me that it was all the friction of immutability without any of the benefits of reproducibility.
- lrvick 2mo agohttps://stagex.tools https://stagex.tools
- doubled112 2mo agoI'm convinced that some day bootc (or something similar) will be exactly what I'm looking for, but not yet.
- talentedcoin 2mo agoVery true. I like the friction aspect to some extent because I think keeping the base system pure confers many benefits. But you’re right. Bazzite imposes a certain workflow. For installing new software … 1) try ujust first (since there is some porcelain provided for some things that can be challenging to install properly on immutable distros, such as Steam or DaVinci Resolve) 2) if that doesn’t work, try flatpaks from Bazaar/Flathub 3) if that doesn’t work, use Homebrew which installs into your home dir by default 4) use rpm-ostree as a last resort. Functionally I find this has driven me towards a very devcontainer-centric setup. Of course in theory Nix can do better, but in practice I’ve found the combo Bazzite offers, not to mention the excellent hardware support, hits the sweet spot for me.
- skydhash 2mo agoMy issue with Silverblue is that the unix exosystem was meant to be deeply collaborative ecosystem for programs. Meaning each program doing one thing and communicating with each other through various IPC mechanisms. Atomic systems with containers broke that. Like I’ve created a rough media player with curl, jq, mpv powered by my subsonic server. The same issues happens with my emacs config which depends on various utilities. Yes I could create a main toolbox for all of that, but the whole thing was a bit cumbersome. When I do want proper isolation, I create a VM.
- aktau 2mo agoMuch more resource heavy. I tried NixOS and Bazzite (and other spins purporting to be lighteweight) and the difference on a 2010-era mid-range laptop was noticeable in terms of sluggishness. Not that this laptop was going to be my daily driver, but I like experimenting. It was a good showing for NixOS and that decided which one I would take. All of the other nice things about NixOS (fast rebuilding, easy install images, remote deploy, easy build tweaks, ...) were cherries on top.
- Y_Y 2mo agoGuix (and nonguix for nonfree things) It's Nix on the inside but the language is Guile Scheme instead of Nix.
- frantathefranta 2mo agoIn 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.
- farfatched 2mo agoI'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.
- microtonal 2mo agoSame, I have contributed hundreds of PRs. You can contribute to nixpkgs while avoiding most politics (it can take time to get a PR merged though). I have stopped visiting the discourse and other discussion venues years ago, they have permanent culture wars, drama, and people on power trips. It is sad seeing a project burn out so many people.
- otabdeveloper4 2mo ago[dead]
- zb3 2mo ago[flagged]
- internetguy 2mo agowill nixpkgs still get updates? how will maintenance work (i am not familiar at all with the nix ecosystem so maybe this is a dumb q)
- threethirtytwo 2mo ago[flagged]
- anglesideangle 2mo agoMaintenance and updates will continue as usual. The maintainers formerly on the nixpkgs core team aren't even stopping their individual contributions.
- iwontberude 2mo ago[dead]
- talentedcoin 2mo agoWhy is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?
- domenkozar 2mo agoBecause people who do good work get attacked left and right and noone steps up.
- Avicebron 2mo ago[flagged]
- tkel 2mo agoIf you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical people that spend most of their lives looking at a computer, not interacting with people face-to-face, does not exactly lend itself to socio-emotional maturity. Seems like in the case of Nix, the more mature people have repeatedly gotten burned out trying to tend to the mess and create a healthy community. It's extremely difficult to get someone to be humble, listen, reflect, and grow, when they are already upset and have their defenses up. And without our normal human tools or other trusted peers to help, like we can call on in real life, it can sometimes be near impossible. Plus, in our highly individualized and hierarchical society, people don't have a lot of practice making decisions democratically, or coming to a consensus with people they disagree with. "Group projects" in grade school is pretty much the only time this happens during our socialization, which is incredibly sparse and inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.
- spott 2mo agohttps://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html Any organization is eventually controlled by people more interested in the organization than its mission. Or something to that effect. (Accidentally attached this to the wrong post, meant for the post above this)
- periodjet 2mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 2mo agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and inflammatory comments like this. The guidelines require us to be kind, to avoid flamebait, and to comment without sneering/snark among other things. If you don't want to be banned, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to observing the guidelines in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tonnikiki 2mo ago[flagged]
- ishanz 2mo agoNix package manager: correctly resolves dependency hell for your entire OS. Nix governance: still hasn't resolved dependency hell for humans apparently.
- stevefan1999 2mo agobut the dependency hell for human is inherently political
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- XorNot 2mo agoFor a certain definition of "correctly" (namely: it doesn't, it just does what containers do and ships unique versions for every package).
- otabdeveloper4 2mo agoContainers don't solve dependency hell. They just give you a standard way to ship your bespoke bash scripts. If you like writing bash scripts then go for it. (Personally I'd rather be doing literally anything else, like, I don't know, shoveling manure.)
- Brian_K_White 2mo agothat's what they said
- stevefan1999 2mo agoContainers do solve dependency hell by isolation. It's like venv/uv in Python that you switch between different environment with different sets of dependency. Or speaking essentially, you lifted yourself away from having dependencies shenanigans since you have virtualizations of it
- 2mo ago
- QwenGlazer9000 2mo agoHonestly after seeing the last election results I knew bad things were coming. The worst of the drama instigators managed to get elected.
- anglesideangle 2mo agoThe post has nothing to do with the election drama you cite: > These issues have persisted despite our repeated attempts to discuss them. This is, of course, a systemic problem rather than one any single SC member could solve; we don’t envy the demands of the role, have been impressed by the efforts of several members, and recognize that every individual naturally has limited time and energy and can only do so much in the context of a representative majoritarian committee.
- QwenGlazer9000 2mo agoI did. And half the post was them talking shit about the SC. Maybe you should read the post?
- ishanz 2mo ago[dead]
- aliasxneo 2mo agoI 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.
- stingraycharles 2mo agoIt 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.
- aliasxneo 2mo agoThat I agree with.
- indy 2mo agoMany such cases across all aspects of society.
- RossBencina 2mo agoIs it patchable? Are there any known-working fixes that can be broadly applied?
- stingraycharles 2mo ago“Our experience is that the Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution, while also not being sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions at those levels itself.” This is an almost poetic description of micromanagement. I really like Nix and have been running it as my main OS for several years in the past ~ 10 years. I don’t think the issues they have are unsolvable, it just appears that the governance model they’re trying to have is not working out, and it’s very difficult to roll back.
- kesor 2mo agoThe governance of the project went into political extremes instead of focusing on technology. That made it impossible for anyone other than political extremists to continue in governance positions. Obviously these people had too much on their plate and couldn't find anyone who would join to help them, as they chased everyone away. Burn out was inevitable.
- astrobe_ 2mo agoThe whole paragraph describes quite well what I feel at the company I currently work for. I think it is more accurate to say that it is interference (rather than micromanagement) and goalpost shifting because whoever is/are in charge don't have a clear idea of where they are going.
- TheMagicHorsey 2mo agoThis phrase could have been authored about every single community leadership committee I've been a part of for the last 20 years.
- klodolph 2mo agoThere 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.
- CuriouslyC 2mo agoAgents are getting pretty good at Nix. I think it has sufficient critical mass that it'll be fine.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoWelcome to zombocom
- talentedcoin 2mo agoThis 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.
- hibikir 2mo agoIt gets worse when you are not a solo dev, and there's sufficient variety on people's setups. Oops, someone updated a version, and then built things for just their processor, and now I am stuck in a 20 minute compilation loop because some bad pin. Debugging Nix problems like those makes me think that old Gentoo Linux back in 2005 was easy and user friendly.
- mikepurvis 2mo agoThe way I set it up at my shop was that everything would build on your PR, and so by the time it merged, everything was already cached and no one should see a rebuild... at most a download.
- Larrikin 2mo agoNix sounded great, but actually trying to use it for personal use felt like a constant time sink. LLMs made it seem like their bespoke language could be side stepped and one could get all the benefits of the ideas without the time sink. But now they have drama, so I hope someone runs with the idea but for humans and possibly LLMs.
- jbstack 2mo agoThe time sink thing is a trade off. You spend more time up front configuring some aspect of your system. But then you generally don't have to ever think about it again, until your needs change. For example: Ubuntu: a problem needs solving -> spend an hour learning how to solve it -> implement solution -> a year goes by -> new machine -> same problem -> spend an hour because you forgot the solution -> implement it again NixOS: problem -> spend 2 hours -> implement -> never repeat again
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- alberth 2mo agoCan 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.
- whateveracct 2mo agothe thing being disbanded is less than a year old
- toshinoriyagi 2mo agoThis 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.
- Alien1Being 2mo agoIf 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.
- vehemenz 2mo agoI’m not saying it’s decisively correlated, or anything on its own, but there sure are a lot of anime avatars in this community.
- Cyph0n 2mo agoNix and NixOS probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the anime pfps :)
- coldbrewed 2mo agoI do not like anime but holy crap do people with anime pfps make excellent software engineers and terrifying red teamers.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- yoyohello13 2mo agoIt’s really the furries that keep the modern world running.
- sunaookami 2mo agoFurries != Weeaboos/Otakus
- yoyohello13 2mo agoLet’s me honest, the communities have a lot of overlap.
- frantathefranta 2mo ago[flagged]
- coldbrewed 2mo ago
- vasco 2mo agoEven just reading this has more bureaucracy than at a company with hundreds of people. Holy hell some projects turned open source into committees and committees to decide what committees are needed.
- jonringer117 2mo agoNix ran for many years with very little to no structure. This worked fine as long as the community has some cohesion around it being a FOSS project. But political divisiveness happened around 2021 and crept into the community. You're still seeing the fallout of https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/98 https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/98
- ronef 2mo agoFor anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of this is possible. Personally, I'm sorry and grateful. Sorry that it ended in core folks being burnt out. Grateful since they did some of the most amazing work, more than anyone can imagine two people doing.
- throwaway260806 2mo ago> more than anyone can imagine two people doing The core team was just 2 people and they disbanded? There was also a steerco for just 2 people? I’m now even more confused.
- anglesideangle 2mo agoHere's the team's description https://nixos.org/community/teams/nixpkgs-core/ https://nixos.org/community/teams/nixpkgs-core/. They were able to accomplish quite a lot of useful work. The steering committee is a separate organization (https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/ https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/) that contains more people and arguably accomplishes less.
- zem 2mo agothere are two distinct usesn of team/committee/council/etc in the software world, though they often get conflated. one is a formal structure to help with things like coordination and governance when many people are working on something, and it does seem a little silly to have one consist of just two people. but the other usage is to create an entity, and say "this entity is responsible for so and so problem", and humans then sign up to be part of the entity as a formal indication that they are working on this problem. and in this sense of the word it's perfectly fine for a core team to be two people, and for it to officially disband when those people no longer want to be working on the problem for whatever reason. note that they did try to recruit new people to the effort, and if they had succeeded then the "core team" entity would have provided some sort of continuity to the project despite the original people moving on.
- lrvick 2mo agoAnyone looking for a full source bootstrapped, multi-party-signed, container native, and deterministic alternative to nix, check out https://stagex.tools https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex
- alberth 2mo agoIsn’t this an apples/oranges comparison. Nix/NixOS is fundamentally about a declarative system configuration. And as far as I understand, StageX doesn’t have that.
- lrvick 2mo agoYou can define an immutable, deterministic, and bootable system image for anything from an enclave to a laptop with just the primitives provided by the OCI Containerfile standard. A stagex containerfile can define a system build recipe in such a way that several competing build systems that obey the same standard can all get the same hashes, which we sign every release.
- alberth 2mo agoJust to confirm my understanding, is the following corrects? NixOS: “Given this configuration, build me the same system again.” StageX: “Prove that every binary in this system came from the source code I think it did.” Because aren’t these two very different things.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2mo agoDifferent angles, same problem. Nix should deterministically take the same pinned inputs and produce the same output, which is also a solution to "Prove that every binary in this system came from the source code I think it did." (since that source code is one of the inputs that's pinned)
- lrvick 2mo agoBoth statements are valid for StageX
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Eueudhsbsj32 2mo agoHopefully 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.
- andersonpico 2mo agoAll the posts about nix always go something like: 1. the "I used nix once/some time ago but I realized it's stupid/hard/whatever" 2. anime pfps/furries/trans/woke are bad 3. complaining about CoC/governance/etc Irrespective of whatever the posted article is about relating to this technology. This is one of those threads. Nix seems to have one of the worst discussion quality around here. Rust threads are similar (though they got better recently), specially on the negative unrelated comments side, but seem to have much more engaged people. Maybe Anubis has a similar ratio. I wonder why?
- elliotec 2mo agoYou're not helping though. If you want that to be different, focus on different things rather than bringing attention to what you're complaining about.
- andersonpico 2mo agoWhy though? I didn't see it mentioned yet and maybe there are valid reasons for that happening that I'm not aware of. Also, discussing the thread in itself seems more relevant than how hard/confusing/woke you find a language. I'm not here making a call to action or trying to police the thread, if anyone want to go off topic be guest.
- SpecialistK 2mo agoThere's an old adage, but without being in the Nix scene I don't know how applicable it is: "If everywhere you go smells like dog poo, look at your own shoes."
- garn810 2mo agoAh, 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)
- Brian_K_White 2mo ago[flagged]
- Alien1Being 2mo agoSounds like our decision to avoid Nix was wise in retrospect...
- setheron 2mo agoI dunno about all this hullabaloo. I'm at https://nix.vegas/ https://nix.vegas/ having fun and using Nix. https://imgflip.com/i/aye90c https://imgflip.com/i/aye90c
- darkwater 2mo agoSo, looks like that being a good manager and serving it is no that easy for a good engineer in the end. (I'm not snarking at Nixpkgs core team, just at the many HN readers there that hate engineering managers in general just because they had some bad experience personally)
- eska 2mo agoVery telling that you think it’s comparable. An engineering manager doesn’t manage a random bunch of international people, but a smaller group of (company culturally) vetted people.
- icase 2mo agolol i can’t wait to hear the lunduke show about this one
- greenhat76 2mo agoLunduke still has an audience? Lol dude is a washed up loser.
- Alien1Being 2mo ago[dead]
- shevy-java 2mo agoLet's not sugarcoat it too much: NixOS is dying. Also, we see censorship running supreme again: "This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden" People need to stop censoring everything, seriously. NixOS going downwards also coincides with the rise of AI. AI slop really puts stress onto so many projects now.
- xarwex 2mo agoI doubt this ecosystem is dying, I am pretty sure it has reached the critical mass of software where enough things depend on it that if it is to die out it needs to be replaced by something way better. Some technology is here to stay for better or for worse (Java won't die no matter how hard I'd want it to). Also nix is one of a better languages when it comes to ai, since invalid programs just don't really run. As long as I dislike the slop aspect of ai, I can trust it to do things to my nixos system without my system breaking, which I'd never even imagine on any other os. I believe that it may be one of a few languages that will benefit from clankers, since the barrier of entry is so high, you can use it as a very reliable crutch.
- looperhacks 2mo agoSorry guys, it's my fault. Every time I try to get into nix, there's a new community meltdown. I just installed NixOS yesterday ...
- imadierich 2mo ago[dead]
- 12345hn6789 2mo agoGave up participating in the community once Jon Ringer was banned / the drama. Pretty much revealed how political the community is. Ironically I think the better a tool solves a problem the more radical the community gets. We don't have to bicker over how to solve the problem and thus people find another avenue. Anyways the writing was on the wall for this and Nix is dying.
- rurban 2mo agoThe dissed Steering Comittee answer: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-scs-role-in-the-disbandment-of-the-nixpkgs-core-team/79433 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-scs-role-in-the-disbandmen... (They disagree)