this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Nix / NixOS
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I want to be optimistic about nix but the main community on discourse is a travesty. It's a more a political arena than a coding forum and actively hampers nix development. Any important decision is either made in isolation (a small group of high up people) or on the forums, and the forums are a mined battlefield. Code and words don't matter, only who wrote or said them.
Nix has had many opportunities to be the basis for something amazing and supported by a large company. Valve could've used nix to have dependency locking. Imagine bazzite, the most gamer friendly distro, being built on nix. That would've propulsed nix at least onto a mountain to visible to many Linux users. But if I were Valve and had a single look at the forums and documentation, I too would've chosen something else.
I'll also just mention nix flakes and its experimental yet widespread use with no official documentation or support. Imagine joining and being told to use flakes then being pointed to blog posts from 2019, example repos, and YouTube videos to start using it. That isn't a good look at all.
Nix has potential but the community squanders it in favor of culture wars, pride, principle, and just anything unrelated to Nix.
Flakes should never have happened the way that they did IMHO. The situation it's left the project in is awful. It's stuck. They can't move forward and accept flakes because they undermine some fundamental things. They can't move backwards and remove them or even make breaking changes because they're in such widespread use.
I like flakes. They solve several problems and are convenient. Only oddity ive hit is that theyre a subset of the nix language. What am I missing? What would forward look like?
Have a read of the thoughts of somebody with closer ties than myself.