this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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nixos was built by functional programming academics and trans people and some undue influence because some early hitlerite at a hip VC-funded shop sold his boss on paying him to be a maintainer won't change that. nix isn't a complementary good to the war machine the way red hat was to data center hosting, it's a novel package manager, DSL and OS that's like catnip for brogrammers.
we've got https://lix.systems/ which is probably the birth of that fork, but also eventually a bean counter at the death factory will look at what they're paying the nerds to do and fire that whole team
It's more nuanced than that. The inventor of Nix, Eelco dolstra, is actually a terrible person who went all in on his terribly designed "flakes" project subsystem which he built directly into the language. Flakes are
represented in code form (literally just thin wrappers built into the Nix language that you can emulate in like an evening and this shit WENT ON FOR 5+ FUCKING YEARS)
This, imo, started the stagnation of the community as Dolstra was trying to sell flakes to as many enterprises as he could and disengaged from the actual community. Eventually he got short-circuited by the Lix people who forced the CppNix team to actually implement useful things and not features for Dolstra's shitty VC funded company. NixOS is not Nix which is not Nixpkgs. Eventually, anduril realized it could just hire Nix people they liked who would give them undue influence over the project due to the advantage of actually being paid. The "leadership" decided to do a Europe and tackle this with electoralism (which then elected all the shitty people who caused the problem).
In that process, a lot of people got burnt out and lost faith in the project. A recent Nix community survey listed the majority of the community identifying as men and if you go on the NixOS discourse instance you get slammed with hitler particles and VC companies advertising ai slop or their new hiring bid (or people help begging on stuff that was caused by the stagnation of flakes).
Lix and Floral (a potential working group for a fork of nixpkgs) are the only things keeping me on this project.
had the same experience on their matrix in like 2017 so I'm not surprised, but the VC piece is new. ty for the context, I don't have a flakes opinion but good to know about the creator
my point about the bean counters is still relevant. there is nothing in the nix ecosystem that provides a complementary good to weapons manufacturing, so eventually whatever nerd at anduril who's obsessed with nix will be cowed by capital. this isn't an AWS/RHEL situation
It really does feel like any nix nerd who works at these companies are just obsessed with the project. The pattern is that they all believe that nix is going to revolutionize everything and so whatever horror they help with is actually a net positive. It'll all go away once those people leave so thats why they buy into crapware like flakes.
The company is called Determinate Systems and they've made it not so subtle that they're trying to rugpull people onto their nix implementation with flakes to boost their product. Their nix stuff is even proprietary, like legit nonfee.
Flakes were actually a relatively new thing surprisingly. They got shipped as part of a huge nix "overhaul" that subsequently was one of the worst releases in the projects history.
Theres so much drama in a package manager you wouldn't believe it.