apparently there are rumors of lix being “lesbian nix”* and I can only say that were this the case, I would expect the project to be entirely coated in queer iconography down to a bright pink color scheme
(okay to be fair it actually took about two months to do what… checks notes a $4M VC funded startup hasn’t been able to do in several years; and we also had a politically savvy frenchman)
Thanks so much to everyone who hung in this week as we’ve all worked to fix the state of the Nix community. It’s been a ride; but I think things are going to get better.
Here’s the last major piece of the puzzle — the product of several months of work from an absolutely incredible team. It’s not ready for a full announcement, but we’ve opened our beta so people who are fleeing the core Nix community have a place to go.
This isn’t just a fork of Nix—this is the work of a team of 10+ people near-constantly since early February. (Technically, us too — but our task is really just enabling others.)
Some serious work has gone into ensuring it improves on upstream without having the regressions that have plagued them last three major versions!
And, since this will matter to some — it’s not a project of the NixOS foundation, but an independent organization that takes its responsibility to its community seriously.
some good news: solutions to the nix stuff are coming; so if you’re thinking of mass evacuating the ecosystem please hold off a little to see what’s coming this week
in the interim, please note that a lot of the problems that have been happening are due to a small group of people who’ve done wrong via the nixOS foundation, the nix language project, and a few community comms platforms
there are an abundance of wonderful folks working on nixpkgs and nixos; and their incredible work is to be celebrated rather than being thrown out because a project they consume turned out toxic
@baloo sorry it’s taking so long; this has been a long battle for a small group of people who’ve stepped up to address the bad; and pacing has been really important to make sure solutions are for the long term
@baloo (I’m not really important on this particular team — there are a bunch of talented folks working really hard on things; I’ve just been trying to take load off them when I can.)
@jason (to be clear I’m not affiliated with the foundation in any way, shape or form)
but yeah, I don’t expect this to fix the trauma that was already happening before this, or the damage from eelco’s awful response; but I do think the source of the bad can be removed and then the good parts reforged into something else; or something else can be built
(that all said if you’re burnt out by this or this has become something where remaining will hurt you, please ignore this and take care of yourselves instead)
amazing seeing people personally write out things for days on end, and then seeing their detractors look at the length and go “stop having chatgpt write for you”