NixOS forked

Dude still hasn't decided where to host the repo. It's not an alternative, guix is...
- Aux is more similar to Nix, than Guix is.
  Guix uses the same concepts, but still is very different.
  
  What a horrible name. I literally had to search for "aux nix" to find a Reddit post mentioning the URL. Every other search term combination was giving me results for ps aux.
- Hopefully it is delay due to setting up self-hosted options. I would support it if I didn’t have to use Microsoft GitHub—Nixpkgs is the reason my account hasn’t been deactivated.
  
  You can contribute to Nixpkgs without GitHub account
  https://discourse.nixos.org/t/about-the-patches-category/477
- Hoping to switch to Guix someday, but we'll see.
  
  It's not really worth it IMO except for lisp and Emacs packages. The biggest issue for me was that nearly every other package I need was seriously out of date.

I'm out of the loop, what's the issue with the current Nixos maintainers?
- Here's a tl;dr : https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained
  If you're looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:
  Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power
  Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn't like
  Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority
  This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community
  Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company's community as a substitute for Nix community
  And a not too long read : https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2024-04-27-nix-internal-crisis.html
  
  Thanks!
  
  has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like
  Hmm. I've seen this before. It looks like the "sensationalist" crowd has issues with people who don't go along with their sensationalism.
  I'm not a Nix expert nor do I know the inner-workings of its management. I've just seen this so many times that I don't expect more from people at this point.
  It sucks when idiots group together to push smart people into doing their bidding. I respect those who resist it, though.

Not very clear to me that this is any more valuable than OG NixOS.
This sounds a lot like the forgejo vs gitea fork. I love the forgejo people but I am yet to see a sufficient differentiator.
- https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
  I dunno, some of these are a pretty big deal, in particular:
  Gitea repeatedly makes choices that leave Gitea admins exposed to known vulnerabilities during extended periods of time. For instance Gitea spent resources to undergo a SOC2 security audit for its SaaS offering while critical vulnerabilities demanded a new release. Advance notice of security releases is for customers only.
  Gitea is developed on github, whereas forgejo is developed on and by codeberg, who use it as their main forge (also mentioned on that page). Someone dogfooding gives me more confidence in the software.
  
  Tbf most of gitea is hosted on gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029
  Just not the main repo because of a blocking issue (which makes the above link pretty annoying)
- I think the reason is because apparently a lot of people are unhappy with a deal Nix inked apparently with a company that does business with the US' Immigrations and Customs
- I like #Nix, I do not like what has happened to it.
  With no explanation of what happened, the conclusion is almost certainly Internal politics.
  It seems like forgejo split from gitea because it looked like gitea was going the route of gitlab. Idk if NixOS is going to commercialize though. Based on recent gossip it sounds like they're overly adverse to commercialization. IE banning people for having DoD connections. Aux's talk about special interest groups makes it sound like they're going embrace that like redhat.
- They were still pulling in mainline Gitea changes while introducing their own stuff last I checked.
  
  Pulling in mainline gitea changes, I did see. But I didn't see any notable differences from gitea. Do you know of any?

NixOS forked
Sounds like it broke and you wanted to f-bomb it in the Good Place.
- Forking shirtballs!
- Wait, why can't I say fork?
- That's fscked

Was waiting for that to happen

Is Guix a cleaner base for a NixOS alternative ?
- They are very diverged projects, but share the same philosophy. The Nix packages themselves aren't the problem, its the organization backing them. So this fork is attempting to create better governance and organization, so that the good underlying tech can keep going and progress.
  For example, Flakes have been held back from truly flourishing because the governing body has purposefully held back changes to those systems for nontechnical problems, but rather political conflicts with their proprietary offerings.
  Think of the fork the same way we had the Alma/Rocky forks off of CentOS. Its political rather than technical, so keeping the same base tech helps adoption. Over time we can improve or replace parts of the ecosystem as the needs of this new project grow.
- I think so. The language (Scheme) is a lot more logical to me, and the higher focus on reproducibility in the main channel compared to Nix (Guix can be bootstrapped from a tiny binary seed) is a draw for me.
- Sadly no AFAIK, even ignoring the licensing issues.

I would love to host a mirror of the ecosystem once the fork is underway. I made a small attempt a little while ago to create a mirror of the Nix repos but the documentation on how to set it up was lacking. Hosting a Debian mirror is relatively easy, Nix appeared quite a bit more obfuscated.
- Nice. I guess there will be more news on their Mastodon account or their website at some point : https://hachyderm.io/@jakehamilton/112349915028065428

Finally!

I was just thinking about switching to Nix, but I have no idea what to choose now.
- I disagree with @Shareni@programming.dev (sorry!) - the biggest issue right now is that package maintainers are leaving in droves - at least 15 contributors left a few days ago, a number which has likely increased these past few days - and will continue to increase. I think the only people left will be the ones who support Eelco and the toxic culture brewed by him.
  What this means is that you risk your packages getting out of date, including slow delivery of security updates (which was already an increasing concern, due to the way the Nixpkgs build system worked). Worst case scenario, some (many?) packages may never even get an update.
  So now's definitely NOT a good time to switch, and in fact I'd also urge existing users to look at other distros, at least temporarily until this whole thing settles down.
  
  I disagree with @Shareni@programming.dev (sorry!)
  Don't say sorry for making an actual argument, or are you some Canadian lol?
  at least 15 contributors left a few days ago
  According to this list there are 3470 maintainers. Were those 15 doing so much work to warrant calling it the end of days?
  What this means is that you risk your packages getting out of date, including slow delivery of security updates
  A possible delay for some package updates vs certainly outdated packages in my native Debian. Not really a choice IMO
- Just use Nix and see where the drama goes in a year. I'm guessing your configs will be fully compatible or only require minimal changes, if the forks survive that long in the first place.
  I'd suggest learning nix, flakes, and home-manager before going anywhere close to NixOS. This should help you out
- You should learn the nix lang, flakes, zero to nix, etc and try not to get bogged down in the Nix/Aux stuff. Be prepared to wait for things to settle down on that side.

Ok, but why? Forking generally means you are unhappy with something but no one is saying what.
- https://github.com/KFearsoff/nix-drama-explained
  
  ah, thanks mate.
- There's been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I'm honestly not sure of the details but it's ptesumably less about the software than the people.
- I read somewhere that there was some drama about identity politics.

Nice! I'm really looking forward to this. I've been playing with nix for a while, but there were some things that prevented me from seriously adopt it (e.g. flakes are still considered experimental, but they are widely used).

This looks good, I'll switch over as soon as they decided on a hoster. I don't have too much experience working in open source projects, but I'll try to contribute what I can

Sounds like a awesome fork, can't wait!

Eelco steps down
Is the fork still going to happen?
- Forked : https://hachyderm.io/@jakehamilton/112355361353931366