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.
That being said, I think it is still a concept worth pursuing.
Please name the next iteration something less spicy.
NixOS is dying, everyone sees this right now.
> but we've also functioned without one for ~20 years.
Then this is also a PR problem because why need a team when the 20 years before were allegedly so perfect?
Huh? Based on what? The packages I use keep getting updated, so clearly nixpkgs is alive. The OS I use keep getting updated, so clearly NixOS is alive to. Who exactly is dying, and what makes you believe that?
I'm sorry to say that this is a highly ignorant reaction to the situation. Nixpkgs was nowhere the size it is now in terms of contributors and packages, the growth in the past six years was enormous.
But also out of those 6y the core team did not exist for ~5y, apparently. How is it a highly ignorant reaction?
Your argument only holds if I were to say "it grew to its current amount of monthly contributions in 2020 and then stayed constant, without growing any further."
Also see roberth's resignation [2], and Gabriella439's retrospective [3], and then there's Jon Ringer's thing, the list goes on.
[1]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-th...
[2]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/stepping-down-from-the-nix-tea...
[3]: https://haskellforall.com/2025/09/steering-committee-retrosp...
The second blog post is from someone on the steering committee who complains about Gabriella439 (the author of the 3rd blog post) "turning on" them after they tried to work with the moderation team, whatever that means.
The third blog post complains that the moderation team was too large, had a lot of absenteeism problems, and tried to do everything by consensus which didn't work with the large size combined with the absenteeism problems.
The last post is most revealing. It's also the least dramatic. It looks to me like they tried to form a way too large group of people who treated this as a low priority, then tried to do everything by heavy procedures and consensus with half the team not showing up. That's a common mistake in community organization that leads to collapse.
EDIT: I looked up the conversation about the NixOS moderation team resigning. Apparently the moderation team was causing a lot of their own problems within the community. I'm not going to read it all, but this looks like familiar overzealous moderator drama
My favorite example so far was that someone got banned and one of the conditions for getting unbanned was removing steak from their profile picture: https://github.com/NixOS/moderation/commit/e9d67b7efa03e6e9b...
This was the elected steering committee doing its job, and a sign of growing health.
> So while I shouldn’t let myself be bullied away, I am stepping down from the Nix maintainer team.
> I am not as of now stepping down from the SC, because that would be irresponsible.
First time dealing with a committee? It is routine for every community to be shrouded in an ongoing cloud of drama and that doesn't indicate anything at all. There certainly could be problems and if there are it'll generate chatter, but the problems have to be dealt with individually. People resigning and complaining about a steering committee is normal.
One of the most notable actions of the team was managing a protest against defense companies assisting the project.
Its disbanding was just another instance of the well documented, and statistically supported, end of the cancellation committee trend that rapidly took off in 2021, peaked in 2023, and has nearly fully receded into oblivion since then.
The backlash against that trend, while not communicated publicly by most (far-right folks excluded...), has been massive, but handled tactfully, behind the scenes. Always important to remember that the equity-left is only about 20% of Americans, and the US is the global stronghold for such ideals. (That 20% makes quite a bit of noise, which gives many the impression that there are many more than there actually are. The reality is just that most people are polite, and don't want to get involved in discourse where their opinions could lead to them facing dramatic negative consequences.)
The global community has not been supportive of the continuing of the trend. So it's not just pushback from the (largely polite) majority of those in the English-speaking world that gave the whole situation a fair shake.
Anyway, to reiterate: the moderation team's disbanding had just about nothing to do with technical aspects of the project, and it could be argued that its disbanding was potentially a positive sign for stability.
What ? The U.S main ideological exports of the last 50 years are neoliberalism, alt-right and techno-feudalism. Its 2 party would register as far right and center right in basically any other country.
> The U.S main ideological exports of the last 50 years are neoliberalism, alt-right and techno-feudalism
U.S.A is responsible for the pervasiveness of social liberalism in the centre-left of Western countries, and more specifically the topics of its American version (the so called "wokeness"). It's distinct from neoliberalism, although academic left, and its pundits, like to use that misnomer for anything liberal they want to put down. And I want to point out that all of the terms you used are generally poorly defined.
> Its 2 party would register as far right and center right in basically any other country.
That's also wrong, just look at the current European landscape. American Democrats are not like CDU in Germany, Conservative Party in UK, PiS in Poland, etc. , but rather closer to the centre-left counterparts in the respective countries.
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.
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.
Nice attempt to try to rescue here, but everyone sees that NixOS is dying.
When a group of, say, ten people give up in a moment, that does not bode well for the future of NixOS.
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.
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.
In my mind, Nix was unstoppable, and I particularly loved how empowered I imagined developers would feel. No mystery-meat CI scripts pushing packages to distant infrastructure that no one understands or even has the permissions to interact with, just the entire build system in one repo, trivially cloneable and hackable... add patches or build steps to anything and it's the same build as always, build it locally or send it to Hydra, it doesn't matter.
A devs "got" it and did leverage those things, used PRs to do safe evaluation of bumps to core dependencies, but I think on the whole it was regarded as cool but not tractable, and a few years after leaving, it sounds like plans are being laid to replace it all with something containers or whatever.
Very frustrating, particularly in a world where it should be trivial to identify the 5-10 typical tasks that people want to do with the nix code, and set up Claude skills to handle those. Given how easy and self-contained the build-test loop is, it feels like an almost perfect fit for agent-led development.
Overall I think it is succeeding, though it definitely doesn't 'just work' out of the box. We've invested a fair bit of effort into things like:
- containerised services[1]
- UI for branch deployment/service management
- delta patching (at the byte level, to save bandwidth)
The main problem was always that nixlang/nixpkgs are arcane and have a steep learning curve. The majority of your colleagues (in any workplace) don't care about build systems and just want things to work. I think that has been more or less solved by LLMs, and it's now more viable than ever to adopt Nix.
For that work project though, the final closure was thousands of store paths, with hundreds of source repos being brought together across a multiple of languages and build systems. A lot of that was/is essential complexity, just the reality that robotics is hard, the tools aren't as mature as in other domains, and so you have to be able to develop features and bugfixes all over a huge software stack simultaneously. Doing that with conventional tooling basically gets you a rigid world where you have to tag/release intermediate packages all the time just to get changes into testing, or you have to build the world on every push (lol docker).
With input addressing and hermetic building of the intermediate stages, Nix and Bazel are systems that don't make you make that choice.
How were you doing that? Running your own channels, or something more complex?
Also, did you use a push or a pull model w.r.t. the robots?
I don’t want to configure a global environment. I just want a build system that works reliably in any environment and can cross-compile from any platform to any platform.
Nix does too damn much. All I want is a build system that doesn’t suck. And I want to run it on windows + Mac + Linux as a first class citizen. And I want to arbitrarily target any platform.
What this really comes down to is that Linux C/C++ toolchains are badly designed. Nix is a huge massive convoluted architecture to try and twist itself around that unfortunate reality.
At least that’s my spicy unpopular opinion that is probably wrong but is at least has elements of truth.
The pervasive link detection structure of effectively everything on GNU/Linux assumes is (more-or-less) objectively incorrect behavior in any sane security minded context. Binaries should be able to declare the interface/contract they expect (args/types/abi/exceptions/cryptographic signatures/digests). Then the runtime linker "match" against the local system. The current system is basically 2 levels of string equality checking.
Nix goes into the right direction by getting your runtime linker/elf-runtime & package manager "integrated". But this sort of just feels like putting 'lipstick on a pig' and dancing around the core issue that `foo.exe` cannot ever realize `foobar-v1.8` and `foobar-v1.7` are both installed on the same computer. Nix just manages the environment/symlinks such that `foo.exe` doesn't realize this fact.
It's like saying obese people are not attractive. It's just obviously true, but no one likes to talk about it and many people (who are obese or aren't) don't want to hear it.
When you say this: "I don’t want to configure a global environment. I just want a build system that works reliably in any environment and can cross-compile from any platform to any platform."
The godawful truth is, Nix fails at the task above. It sucks at it and does a bad job at it because it's so freaking complex. Plenty of people in denial about this but they just can't stare at the sun. They build their complex convoluted solutions and convince themselves Nix was the way while blindly looking away from the pitfalls.
One commenter literally was talking about how his company adopted nix and how they suddenly backpedalled on nix and he COULD not understand why. If you are one of those people who cannot for the life of you understand I am here to tell you that why a company back pedals on nix is as obvious as the sun. You just can't stare at the sun or you don't understand humans.
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.
“Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with changes and it’s possible that things break. My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break.
Regarding Nix complaints:
Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe you find something that is actively updated, maybe not. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off because the maintainer didn’t bother. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons. What I want is just to know what level of distro-level maintenance the package has, including its transitive dependencies.
Docs are just kinda bad. Fragmented across different sites. Docs teaching you Nix forwards or backwards, or teaching old Nix, or teaching Nix with flakes, or teaching you Nix for end-users or developers or package maintainers, or Nix on Mac or NixOS. A surprising number of broken links. What I want is one site, with a little drop-down menu to select the version I am using. What I have is hours spent on the NixOS Discord trying to figure out how to do basic stuff.
I'm not using "rebuild" to describe recreating an instance from scratch, but in the "nixos-rebuild" sense, i.e. I can deploy a fleet-wide configuration shared by all hosts, or apply package updates across the fleet, etc.
As for the skepticism, all I can offer is my experience which is that it does indeed work, and I've been running this way for awhile.
> Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with changes and it’s possible that things break.
The only time I've had breaking changes that required manual intervention was on a major release update. The issue amounted to "You're using abc configuration option but should be using xyz instead". This message was clearly logged, and fixing it was a matter of a few minutes of reading why a particular property name had changed.
Those updates happen twice/year, and in the last ~3 years I think two packages have forced me to make a change. Unless you're running unstable, you won't encounter this for ongoing package updates within a release.
On the topic of rebuilding from scratch, that's not a single command, but it's only a few. VMs/containers mount incus volumes (zfs-backed) for data storage, and a fresh rebuild is a matter of spawning a new instance from my homelab base image (I use OpenTofu to orchestrate this), running a nixos-rebuild targeting the new instance from my workstation, and things are back up and running. But I'm less focused on full rebuilds since I'm already doing Incus backups and can restore on any of the nodes in my Incus cluster.
> My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break.
My goals are similar. I can completely understand sticking with Debian for two hosts. I had experimented with NixOS for years but never really went all-in until I started expanding my homelab environment. At that point, NixOS just clicked and I'm far more productive with 30+ hosts than I used to be with 1-2.
> Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe...
Which channel were you running on? And do you have any examples of specific packages? What you're describing just sounds foreign to me. I currently default to the latest stable release but if there's something that isn't in stable I'll override that specific package to use unstable. Much of the community just runs everything on unstable, but I prefer a slightly slower pace of updates.
Nixpkgs is the largest package repository across distros by volume, and as much as I love Debian, it's far more common to find things missing there.
> Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons
This sounds like you're branching into territory that can no longer be reasonably framed as NixOS vs. Debian (or other distro of choice).
> Docs are just kinda bad.
This is by far the project's greatest weakness. LLMs have been the saving grace. The frontier models are excellent at NixOS and I've switched to mostly having a conversation in my NixOS Claude project when I need info. This is in no way a defense of the docs, but for anyone motivated to use NixOS, there is at least a good option beyond the docs themselves.
I use kubenix to manage the cluster, of course. ;-)
Why doesn't your company fund development of nix and its associated ecosystem?
On the other hand, building an entire company atop experimental software that might explode or cease to exist tomorrow seems so monumentally stupid that the inevitable business failure is the outcome they don't need, but so badly deserve.
With multiple types of machines involved, you want some sort of binary cache setup, ideally automated with CI. There's niks3 [0], celler [1] (a more active fork of attic [2]), hydra [3].
0: https://github.com/Mic92/niks3
1: https://github.com/celler-cache/celler
post-build-hook = .../upload-to-cache.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
set -f
export IFS=' '
exec "${NIX_CACHE_NIX_BIN:-nix}" copy --extra-experimental-features nix-command \
--to "s3://my-cache-bucket?region=us-east-1" $OUT_PATHS
There could be similar issues with NSS but I think more people are ready to bypass NSS altogether.
Nix governance: still hasn't resolved dependency hell for humans apparently.
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.)
Perhaps it is no surprise the earlier adopters were people with rigid views.
DOS was built in a basement. Pretty sure suit and tie wasn't the dejour whilst they were doing it.
Linux was a hobby project. Pretty sure that slacks featured more than a blazer.
I would absolutely not expect a business profile image, regardless of the message. Nor do I get why you think it is so essential.
Half the red team industry are furries. Would you criticise them for not using a mugshot? Because a lot of them don't, whilst posting CVEs that affect half the world.
I’m in the process of about to deploy Nixos to server workloads, but am now hesitant because I don’t understand these ramifications.
Nix and NixOS are two of the most revolutionary pieces of software in my experience. Hopefully Nix finds a governance structure worth of it.
Just note that the community is unstable and prone to civil wars.
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.
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.
It's Nix on the inside but the language is Guile Scheme instead of Nix.
It seemed to me that it was all the friction of immutability without any of the benefits of reproducibility.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Nix/NixOS is fundamentally about a declarative system configuration.
And as far as I understand, StageX doesn’t have that.
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.
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.”
If I remove a package from the list itt best uninstalled, if I add it gets installed, etc
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
> 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.
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.
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)
The Nix drama from the start has been profoundly untethered from actual development or improvement of the project rather than minutia of committee organization and moderation of the Discourse forum
Whatever you think about the $5000 Anduril sponsorship for example, the "discussion" around that took up a ridiculous amount of mindshare relative to the actual dev work compared to almost any other open source project like Linux kernel for example
anyways, i hope there’s a path to some kind of redemption and reconciliation in the future for the community. it sounds like it’s been Bad for years at this point.
https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/
The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community
I have tried very hard to find any examples of what this is a actually referring to and genuinely have no idea
https://github.com/save-nix-together/open-letter/blob/main/c...
For too many, building and celebrating things just because they are cool isn't enough.
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?
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.
"If everywhere you go smells like dog poo, look at your own shoes."
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.
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.
Remember to kill to death pedophiles, including all Ycombinator staff and helpers like tomhow.