this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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TL;DR: Two of the most nicest, most technically proficient people you know just got burnt out from contributing to their operating system and this is just another example of NixOS being poorly maintained.

A year since I divested from NixOS and nothing really has changed. The "flakes" design is still a garbage abstraction invented by a neo-nazi to sell to Peter Thiel and Co. The Nix language has not evolved in any meaningful way (nixpkgs is still the load bearing peg).

Nixpkgs has reached over 1 million commits and is pushing what Git can scale to and is now entirely dependent on a Microsoft GitHub enterprise subscription and a Amazon AWS S3 credits for petabytes of CI/CD.

The community still contains active MIC fascists in leadership roles alongside :votevote Europeans. empoc perspectives are treated as community fracturing.

The nix derivations abstractions has not truly caught on (due to it not even being better than containers resource wise) and flakes only makes this worse with unversioned commit hashes serving as "determinism" and "reproducibility" which have become buzzwords at this point.

I only expect this to get worse and worse as Determinate Systems (MIC ghoul company) takes over and nixpkgs collapses as an independent entity.

BTW they haven't decided on a AI/LLM policy because the steering committee and the nixpkgs core team can't agree or communicate on anything, which basically means NixOS is going to be a AI hype train project if you enjoy that.

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[โ€“] ThatVeganYouHate@hexbear.net 5 points 3 weeks ago (15 children)

I never really understood what NixOS was trying to solve. I already version control /opt/ with all my container definitions and config and can install debian anywhere, clone my repo, restore the stateful database backups and bring up a clone of my server anywhere in minutes.

[โ€“] ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

The only thing that ever impressed me with NixOS was its atomic/immutable rollback feature. Being able to restore to previous "builds" of your OS is something I've always wanted in Arch but the closest I've seen is darch which boots your OS from a container image. But that project is extremely dead despite its readme saying its finished. Documentation was on godarch.com which is down.

Otherwise everything that NixOS does is done better by containerization or Ansible. But my fundemantal problem with Nix is the language itself. I'm strongly against "configuration" languages making any sort of abstractions.

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