The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

For anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of this is possible.

Personally, I'm sorry and grateful. Sorry that it ended in core folks being burnt out. Grateful since they did some of the most amazing work, more than anyone can imagine two people doing.

There was a sweet spot in like 2024 when it seemed like everything was possible with Nix, but now it seems like everything “experimental” is permanently so (like flakes), packages I care about are not as fresh as I want, I have no mental recall for Nix commands…

Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something.

Reminds me of Bazel, in the way that it gets adopted by companies with developer support teams (because it solves real problems) but feels frustrating for us ordinary folk. Nixpkgs is kind of a critical part of “ordinary folk” and with the core team disbanding, I feel like my personal moves away from Nix (for projects) are proving correct.

“Our experience is that the Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution, while also not being sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions at those levels itself.”

This is an almost poetic description of micromanagement. I really like Nix and have been running it as my main OS for several years in the past ~ 10 years.

I don’t think the issues they have are unsolvable, it just appears that the governance model they’re trying to have is not working out, and it’s very difficult to roll back.

Nix package manager: correctly resolves dependency hell for your entire OS.

Nix governance: still hasn't resolved dependency hell for humans apparently.

I’m not saying it’s decisively correlated, or anything on its own, but there sure are a lot of anime avatars in this community.

Can someone explain the ramifications of this to those of us not informed.

I’m in the process of about to deploy Nixos to server workloads, but am now hesitant because I don’t understand these ramifications.

I really don't think these issues are necessarily "systemic" in the sense that they've been ongoing for the last decade. I _was_ a long-time contributor until about two years ago when certain actors came into the community and started making a bunch of unnecessary drama. Since then I've seen some long-time friends in the community either slowly drop out or simply get ran out by a mob with pitch forks.

Anyone looking for a full source bootstrapped, multi-party-signed, container native, and deterministic alternative to nix, check out https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex

After being a heavy user of NixOS, I quit using it due to the communities instability, I don't trust it.

will nixpkgs still get updates? how will maintenance work (i am not familiar at all with the nix ecosystem so maybe this is a dumb q)

Nix sounded great, but actually trying to use it for personal use felt like a constant time sink. LLMs made it seem like their bespoke language could be side stepped and one could get all the benefits of the ideas without the time sink. But now they have drama, so I hope someone runs with the idea but for humans and possibly LLMs.

I'm certain the word "governance" is in the documents for Gentoo and other distributions, but I don't think I've personally heard it even once. It seems to come up enough here with Nix for me to notice as an end user.

I never considered Nix since Portage and additional package managers like RPM installed by Portage have met my needs, but if I had considered Nix and I heard some of these words used, I probably would have walked away on that alone. Sounds like financial or political marketing.

Even just reading this has more bureaucracy than at a company with hundreds of people. Holy hell some projects turned open source into committees and committees to decide what committees are needed.

Honestly after seeing the last election results I knew bad things were coming. The worst of the drama instigators managed to get elected.

Why is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?

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