https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236
Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :
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
This post contains massive spoilers for Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion, and the four part revival Evangelion movies.
A Cruel Angel’s Thesis
In order to properly convey the level of emotions that I feel about this situation, I need you to understand the weight of The End of Evangelion.
I can’t get through this article without leaving quotes of it as comments.
I would also like to have made this a video of some kind to make it more personal (mostly so you can hear my voice and intonation/emotion in it), but it would take me too long to make it at my current production schedule timelines. I’ve already been spending a fucking month working on a mostly done Pikmin 3 speedrun video that has been constantly interrupted by this shit. As much as I’d like to do this, I don’t think it’s in the cards.
Windows: Ad Ridden
macOS: Not Enough Freedom Apparently
Linux: Community Arguments
Every OS has issues.
Yeah but here’s the thing. The linux community actually has measurable and immediate impact on the OS they choose to involve themselves in.
Have an issue with MacOS or Windows? The absolute best case scenario is that you complain to the devs and they might fix it in a future update.
Have an issue on Linux? Luckily the community you are a part of is also the development team, so you can work together to directly make changes. If those changes aren’t to your satisfaction, you can even find some like-minded people and start your own distro.
What is the problem ? What particular decisions are we taking about beyond the apparent power struggle ?
Looking at this from the outside as a non Nix user, I see two things:
- The community is melting down over something.
- If this is the state of the Nix community where will the support go when it fractures?
If I was asked to evaluate NixOS for something and saw this, I’d keep looking, because this spells disaster for ongoing maintenance.
Not the drama itself should influence your judgment, but how they will deal with it.
Whenever people work together on something, there will be some drama, but if they are dealing with it, then that should be fine.
Nix and NixOS are big enough, that even if it fails, there are enough other people that will continue it, maybe under a different name.
Even it that causes a hard fork, which I currently think is unlikely, there are may examples where that worked and resolved itself over time, without too much of burden on the users, meaning there are clear migration processes available: owncloud/nextcloud, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo, redis/valkey, …