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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2024

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  • “NixOS project” did not call anyone nazis, there was no “purge”, this article is clickbait and ragebait. What one contributor, however prolific, says, doesn’t represent the entire project (even though I somewhat agree with him here - there are sadly some bigots in the community).

    Nobody forced Eelco (the founder of Nix) to “abdicate”, but there was indeed pressure to step down as the de-facto BDFL put on him by various people. He’s respected as an engineer, architect, maintainer and mentor, but his community management skills were perceived to be lacking, and there were other perceived issues in the community - which boiled down to the fact that a lot of contributors didn’t feel like they could influence the direction of the project. Note that he’s not expelled from the project in any way, he’s still a maintainer of Nix itself, which AFAIU from my interactions with him is what interests him the most, and he’s more or less happy to leave administrative/community stuff to other people.

    Then began a process to establish a new governance structure. Currently, we’re up to a stage where there’s now formal community values and a new constitution for the project. There’s an election happening right now, with all active contributors able to become candidates or vote (although the deadline for candidate nominations has passed, so now we can only vote).



  • UNIX was kinda designed to be an IDE (of its time) by itself. Desktop/Server Linux (whether GNU or non-GNU) mostly continues this tradition; you are provided with some powerful tools for text manipulation, development, debugging and deployment out of the box in most distros. As such, any modern Linux distro is pretty good for development even out of the box. However, you must learn to use this power, and I’m not claiming it’s easy (I still regularly look up various manpages despite doing development on Linux for 10+ years in various forms).

    With that said, I myself prefer NixOS. It really feels more developer-oriented that other distros, as you get the power of Nix out of the box, and integrated into the system. With Nix you get easy access to the biggest software repository in the world. You get per-project development shells, so that you never have to worry about different toolchain versions for different projects, or your system being contaminated with bloat you no longer need. You get the power of reproducible packaging, to eliminate a lot of (but unfortunately not all of) “Works on my machine”-type of problems. It’s also got a hell of a learning curve, but I think it’s worth it.