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.
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 The biggest issue for me was that nearly every other package I need was seriously out of date.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I disagree with @[email protected] (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've been tempted for a while to switch from good old reliable Arch (btw) to NixOS, but now I'm glad I procrastinated and just ran it in a little VM specimen jar instead.
I guess it depends on what you're planning doing with NixOS or Aux. I wouldn't use it for anything new and critical. I'd figure out a mitigation strategy if I were relying on it for something critical.
But for experimental purposes, neither option seems like a bad call.
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.
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.
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
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).