this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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libre
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I probably need to learn more about channels, but I've been using flakes for a nix based project that I've been doing just because it makes it easier to compose different pieces of nix code without having to fork the nix packages repo, which is way too big for my scale to manage. I know there are issues with flakes, conceptually and from an organizational perspective, but there are some things that I like about them, that I wish were tractable, otherwise, mostly just due to how huge nixpkgs is.
I would like to break nixpkgs down into base system, desktop, and then some specializations for different types of server applications. Maybe it could just be one thing there, though. I would also like to replace the huge CDN approach that nix upstream uses with a distributed trustix-inspired peer to peer bit torrent setup.
That said I'm not really attached to flakes, they just seemed approachable. I didn't learn about the endural connection until after I'd already built a bunch of stuff lol
Depending on how much work finishing my objectives is, it may be worth switching to guix, but i am not a non-free purist. So there's definitely gonna be some friction with my distribution, either way, I guess. Since Lix is also opposed to flakes I'm really going against the grain in some areas.
The upside of Guix's thoroughness is that every package must be compiled from source, so this means that there are no random blobs or binary bootstraps scattered around like there is in nixpkgs.
Nix flake boosters love talking about how "reproducible" they are until you realize their solution to version pinning is to copy the entire package world, which is akin to cutting down a tree with a nuke. This is a well known problem even given the community name "100 pinnings of nixpkgs" and no one wants to shake the hornets nest.
Guix instead maintains its world as a git repository in the system so every user is compelled to have the latest Guix checkout and then use pinnings on packages themselves and not the entire package set.
Definitely recommend trialing Guix as much as you can, I don't really have any hope in NixOS since the org is so unwilling to break the silence on anything technical or community related. Also they recently obtained an enterprise grant for GitHub so you can see where their priorities and values lie.
I do like the approach that lix and aux are seemingly working towards where there are smaller independent package collections that get linked together somehow. I'm not sure how that would all work, but I do think it's important to keep build size down to something a few motivated individuals can compile on affordable machines. Without something like trustix you inevitably end up needing a huge centralized build farm and CDN to have a useful binary cache. IMO that's the main obstacle to making a viable community driven nixos alternative.