NixOS is an amazing operating system. NixOS is a terrible community.
- No hosting sovereignty. The NixOS code repositories are entirely reliant on Microsoft GitHub for both hosting and compute and recently got a github enterprise grant, so when Microsoft eventually sanctions the global south there will be no nixos anymore outside of the imperial core.
- incredibly wasteful, NixOS hosts petabytes upon petabytes of binary packages with yearly costs only covered by again, grants by AWS because the entire cache is hosted on AWS.
- the reason this waste is created is because there is no community organization on topics such as content - addressed derivations and de-facto dictatorships of terrible ideas like nix flakes.
- nix flakes are an objectively terrible format created by a neo Nazi to sell to american terrorist organizations like anduril. It basically is a shitty npm slop lock file that just brute forces everything by commit sha and doesnt actually align with what Nixpkgs does which are stable releases and rolling releases. Anyone who thinks flakes are good doesnt actually understand nix and is probably a Nazi because the only people who defend flakes are out of touch hype bros and Nazis.
- community has been taken over by centrist libs and palantir worshippers. Either get online microagressions by people who want to build missiles to kill Russia and Iran or get tut-tutted by euro libs who think the same thing but feel embarrassed by the former group.
Use Guix, they are the only successor to the Nix idea, of course unless you are a bay area techbro who has fuck you levels of bandwidths and SSD writes when you checkout 100 different flakes with 100 different nixpkgs.
I use fedora, which despite literally being a community backed by IBMs interest at least doesnt force me to log onto github dot com and inject me with weapons grade copium of going mainstream.
This person is cool though, I watch their stuff because the linux hobbyist space is dominated by a cis white sausage fest.