22h ago

Linux Distribution "NixOS" drama: Moderation Team resigns in protest over Interference of Leadership; Elected Leader works for US Military Company, fearing alignment with US fascistic development

Short Summary of the Community Drama of the Linux Distribution "NixOS", so that you can get the big picture and form your own opinion with the provided sources.

Clarification of the "Steering Comittee" as Project Leadership

see https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/

Moderation Team resigns in Protest

Resignation Post, with examples of interference: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-the-moderation-team/69828
Conflict due different interests:
- the Moderation Team desires being independent. otherwise, they can't moderate the behavior of people in positions of power.
- the Moderation Team is currently accountable to the Steering Comittee: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-the-moderation-team/69828/6

Technical Leadership works for Military Company, causing Fear of Alignment with Facism.

Steering Committee works for Military Company https://discourse.nixos.org/t/sc-member-tomberek-works-for-anduril/68971
People in the community feel uncomfortable with that, since the US and its military are heading towards facsism: https://mstdn.games/@KFears/115275676459535171
The Steering Committee made a public Post about that, explaining the Situation: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/statement-on-a-steering-committee-member-joining-anduril/69007

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66 comments

I've been saying this for years: Just switch to Guix.
An official GNU project;
Herd instead of systemd;
Uses Linux Libre and only 100% free software;
Big, friendly, helpful community;
Regular meetups, unconferences and other events;
Config is done in an established language (Scheme) instead of an idiosyncratic DSL.
- Also, a fraction of packages, users and guides.
  I think Guix is great, but as a NixOS enthusiast who genuinely wanted to try it out, I gave up in the face of the lack of docs for people who aren't working in lab or have a PhD in computing of some sort.
  Also, how is shepherd better than systems? Genuinely curious.
  Lastly, I agree Nix is not a very enjoyable language, but scheme doesn't look like a very beginner friendly option either. Could be wrong, I'm not a programmer.
  
  As someone who is curious about Nix but has given up after trying to wade through the myriad and conflicting "getting started" resources for it, I cant imagine how bad guix docs must be for a Nix enthusiast to adandon it.
  
  Guix basically only has the official docs (which has a lot missing in my experience), a single Youtube channel (System Crafters), official issues/mailing list/IRC, System Crafters forum, the source code, toys.whereis.social, and rarely a blog post or random git repo that might have the information you need
  
  Im honestly more interested in Nix, as even with all the chaos it feels like it has good technical momentum. I just wish there was something equivalent to Geerlings "Ansibles for devops" or Shotts "The linux command line" for it.
  
  If you are still trying to find the best guide, I recommend this one
  https://thiscute.world/en/posts/my-experience-of-nixos/
  
  I'm pretty sure Guile isn't pure functional either, while Nix is
- Is it non-trivial to enable non-free repos?
  
  Never tried! But I'm assuming it's a pain indeed. Not even Signal Desktop works out-of-the-box (or maybe at all, haven't tried either) because of Electron.
  
  That sounds like a pretty useless replacement for people who want a declarative configuration and a PC capable of doing anything other than contributing code to open source projects.
  
  It seems to me like you didn't do your homework before posting, since what you write is patently untrue. Guix is actually, primarily, a (very much functional/declarative) package manager which you can also install on top of other Linuces, even RHEL. Then there's the Guix operating system, which is very much useful for many tasks other than developing free software.
  
  https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
  Quite trivial
  
  no it isn't, non-guix is right there and only one line in the right file
- How do you do Flakes with Guix? That's probably the most important feature Nix has.
  Big, ... helpful community
  Not sure I would agree with that lol
  
  whenever I asked about something in irc I got fairly swift and very helpful responses 🤷
- Yah 100% free no thanks. And I actually like systemd.
- I've been eyeing Guix for a while but haven't jumped in yet. Honestly, I feel like I'm finally getting comfortable with nixos and flakes over the years. There's quite a bit of un/relearning to do, and I can't tell if the flow of Guix's channels/inferiors would match the ease of composability that I like with flakes. The lock system really does it for me and I don't like the idea of hunting down refs to pin manually or maintaining my own frankenstein repo (other than my config).
  That said, I do use emacs and actually like lisp, so I'm torn right now.
- I enjoy lisp and emacs but nothing will convince me to use guix over nixos. At most I guess I would switch to arch and use the guix package manager there.

66 comments