https://chaos.social/@ktemkin/112392108881500298
https://chaos.social/@ktemkin/112392108893774195
This isn’t just a fork of Nix—this is the work of a team of 10+ people near-constantly since early February. (Technically, us too — but our task is really just enabling others.)
Some serious work has gone into ensuring it improves on upstream without having the regressions that have plagued them last three major versions!
And, since this will matter to some — it’s not a project of the NixOS foundation, but an independent organization that takes its responsibility to its community seriously.
So why should we use this instead of just saying lixmaballs and using nix/aux/nux/whatever other fork?
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https://forum.aux.computer/t/the-future-of-nixcpp-lix/483
The announcement resolves one of my last fears for Aux: development on Nix itself. It is no secret that the number of people knowledgeable about the project and are willing to work on this CPP codebase is small. You have probably seen me mention multiple times by now that @sig_cli needs all of the help that we can get. Lix resolves this entirely with a trusted team of experts. This means that Aux is now able to remove Nix development from our priorities and can instead collaborate with Lix moving forward.
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I think that’s backwards. Lix is a replacement for the nix package manager, while aux is a replacement for NixOS.
Aux looks like it will now use Lix for it’s package manager, instead of trying to make its own fork of nix.
If anyone is willing to learn a little bit of Guile Scheme - look, the language is great, the project isn’t contaminated with multiple scripts, project skeleton is much better, the modules are well written, so why not move over there?
The language is great, but the ecosystem is on life support, and I don’t see it getting anywhere close to nix soon. I believe it’s especially crippled by being Linux only and forcing free software to the point you’re not allowed to even mention the non-free repo in the guix irc.
Random Devs and companies aren’t going to use it for their projects, and so there far less maintainers to solve issues like having a node version that’s not in maintenance for half a year and 4 major versions behind, or having automated npm package conversions.
Realistically it’s currently only useful for a few languages with abysmal PMs, most of which are lisps, and like Haskell.
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Now that I think of it, a guix fork would be far more useful than a nix one. You could forgo some of the FOSS extremism, and allow your users to install it without an ethernet cable, and maybe even on the infidel Operating Systems (even though guix is in the official repo for Debian + wsl).
And I bet guile could really use the attention. AFAIK it’s mainly developed by one dude, and he made some impressive improvements. Just check out the release speeches on youtube, massive jumps between versions.
Best of all, the GNU people could focus on building a better core, and choose to adopt only some changes, while preserving the purity of their system.
I believe https://www.pantherx.org/ is both Guix based and, I think, more relaxed on the non-guix issue. Don’t know much else tbh, but peeps interested can check it out.
Aux is still keeping all of their code on Microsoft GitHub, Lix isn’t
Aux is only keeping the code on GitHub temporarily because money is tight and there are very few options for a soft fork of a repo as huge and active as nixpkgs. Plus, they want ease of accessibility for devs considering it’s a very new project.
Long term plans are to move off of GitHub. I’m pretty sure some people are talking to Codeberg to see how feasible it would be to move there in the future.
I would believe that when I see it. They said they would not use GitHub-only features & they already are. These things don’t tend to move once actually set up. You also look at the language around trying to “cast a wide net” being thrown out before “what are our principles” & compromising on that so early is a big oof from me. Folks that can’t be bothered to create a new account or learn a new forge or version control system are not the folks that would be bothered to switch from Nix to Aux.
Literally any other option would offer easier escape …with the exception of the size of Nixpkgs & the fact that most developers don’t understand how to do patches without a pull request on the host platform rendering the D in distributed version control system moot so everyone clamors nothing can scale without Microsoft (allow requests off the centralized forge, allow patches to a mailing list, seed it with Radicle, etc.). The foundations are being built wrong.
i really want to like Nix.
gave it a shot a few years ago, but i felt like documentation and community support wasn’t really there yet. this was long before Nix surpassed Arch in terms of number of available packages. now people still complain about documentation, especially of the Nix language. i see a lot of package authors using it, and that kind of tempts me to start using at least the package manager. but a lot of packages don’t. the allure of GitOpsing my entire OS is very tempting, but then there’s been these rumors (now confirmed) of new forks, while Guix splintered off much earlier. for something that’s ostensibly supposed to be the most stable OS, that makes me nervous. it also seems to have some nontrivial overhead—building packages, retaining old packages, etc.
the pitch for Nix is really appealing, but with so much uncertainty it’s hard to pull the trigger on migrating anything. heck, if i could pull off some PoCs, i think my enterprise job might consider adopting it, but it’s a hard recommend for me today as it was 5 years ago.
Another one?
Mix is right there
How confusing will looking up “elixir mix Linux” be in web searches though 👀
Never enough forks! Don’t like it? Fork it! Fork me and fork you! So much effort lost in all those forks.
No man is an island, but they can fork one!
This is very cool. Im a fan of Nix from a tech perspective but im still not sold because of its poor UX, among many other complaints. IMO it’s the future of the Linux distro, but now that might be closer than before!
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Oc the og based gigachad PhD holder didn’t just force through a RFC which causes thousands of regressions in the main repo. Nix community is sure healthy under this kind of leadership.
