I’m quite happy to see this. The Determinate Nix installer installs Determinate Nix. The Lix installer installs Lix. The upstream NixOS/nix installer installs Nix. (And the NixOS installs have Nix installed from Nixpkgs.) They’re all open source. If we need to cherry-pick between them, we absolutely can. Graham’s making the right call in focus here.
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It’s a different story when they have SEO’ed their way to top-ranking search results for uninformed new users. Lix and Snix and whatever never imply your installing Nix while your actually installing proprietary code from someone else. They use ““nix-installer”” and “Determinate nix installer” interchangeably.
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The Zero to Nix tutorials involve upstream Nix only and make no mention of Determinate Nix or any of its specific features. That will probably change soon but we are hoodwinking precisely no one here.
As for SEO, we haven’t done anything more than add some very standard OpenGraph metadata to that page. Never hired an SEO firm, never engaged a marketing agency, nothing. Have you considered the possibility that it ranks highly in search results because it’s useful and popular?
Talking to dozens of people who have been able to “cross the chasm” with Nix because Zero to Nix proved to be just the right resource for them has been one of the highlights of my career in software.
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It directly tells users to use the Determinate Nix Installer:
You know, the tool which is dropping upstream Nix, that this thread is about? Huh? Am i going crazy?
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We haven’t dropped upstream Nix yet. The contents of Zero to Nix are likely to change but we haven’t needed to change them.
The first result in your screenshot is DetSys’ GitHub repo for their nix-installer, so this is inaccurate.
Here’s a Desktop screenshot of the Google search results so that more of the URL is visible:
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That’s just what google does, I get different results for different search terms “install nix”, “nix install”
And the whole discussion about seo is unncessary if you look at what google itself has to say about this
Nobody looks for linux installer, ubuntu installer, nixos installer, x installer. it is almost always install x or x install. (google trends, google trends, google trends)
I think the thread has served its purpose. All of this additional discussion is tiring tbh.
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I’m a noob when it comes to Nix, I installed NixOS on my laptop and rolled with it. Productive since day 1 (just add some packages to a list) and am learning as I go. Rollback feature is vital in this 
When installing Nix on other Distro’s I go for Determinate System’s installer, has more sane defaults afaik.
Anyway, I was wondering, does this mean a Determinate Systems NixOS is also coming?
We currently offer NixOS AMIs with Determinate Nix and fh, the CLI tool for FlakeHub, installed:
We also have NixOS ISOs with those same things installed:
You can also install Determinate Nix on an existing NixOS system using our NixOS module:
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I am a teaching assistant in a university. I used to prefer to use Determinate Nix Installer to install original version of Nix, because on many students’ devices original Nix installer sometimes have some issues on Linux and macOS. I do not have much time to figure out why installations using original Nix installer have failed on their devices, and using Determinate Nix Installer to install original version of Nix always success without debugging or config. And the default features flags are convenient for using flakes.
I do not use Determinate Nix because of it would set PATH incorrectly. I do not remember what is the exactly behavior because this happens a long time ago.
(Sorry, removed this so I could mark it as a direct reply)
In the current Determinate Nix Installer (which, until January 2026, can install either upstream or Determinate Nix), the shell configuration (PATH) is setup in the same way for either choice. This same code is used regardless of the variant chosen:
Please feel free to reach us in Discord, or file issues on the installer, if you can reproduce it. We’d be happy to look into it more.
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I do value the responsiveness I saw from Determinate Systems even for critical questions so far. So just in case it got drowned between the other posts:
Could you clarify whether it’s possible to use Determinate Nix - and therefore the Installer going forward - in a fully Free Software variant? i.e. without proprietary components and with full source code available?
Much of it being in fact open source might confuse users here. It sure did get me - and from what I gathered from discussions online and at NixCON - I might not be the only one
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Thank you! Next time when new devices arrived I will try it
The Nix CLI portion of Determinate Nix is open source:
You’re free to nix run that or use it however you wish, of course, but there are some features, like the native Linux builder, that won’t work without Determinate Nixd, which is indeed not currently open source. Determinate Nixd also handles things like initial configuration and certificates, which is particularly tricky in organizational settings and on macOS. And so when we say that you “can’t” use Determinate Nix without Determinate Nixd, what we mean is not that any and all functionality is closed off, but rather that we can’t vouch for and don’t actively support that experience.
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Hi. Are there any real plans about open sourcing the determinate daemon, since you write “not currently open source”, or if not, why choose that specific wording?
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No current plans but it’s something we may do in the future. We’re not committed to keeping the status quo forever and so “not currently” seems like reasonable verbiage to me.
Is there a reason stuff like the native Linux builder won’t be upstreamed?
The native Linux builder doesn’t actually “live” in the Nix CLI but rather in a separate script to which the CLI delegates, and so we’d need to give some thought to how that would work in upstream. More importantly, though, we’re still gathering information (and bug reports!) for this very young feature that we haven’t even rolled out to all Determinate Nix users.
But beyond that, you know the answer to questions like this. Nothing has changed. Determinate Nix is free (as in beer) for people to use but it has some proprietary components. We’re trying to build a business and we’ve created a model that works for us but is bound to make some people unhappy. Determinate Nix appears to be inconsistent with the norms to which you hold OSS software, and we respect that.
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One thing I like about the Determinate Nix codebase is the fact that they did not do a mass renaming of the project allowing us to cherry pick commits into your own branch of nix as one sees fit.
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