Didn’t have a Discourse account until now, but I had otherwise been active in the Matrix and Discord communities. Decided to make one new for the sake the original post, in hopes that it may prompt people to reflect on things.
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I’m all for a more inclusive and welcoming community, but I recognize it’s not easy sometimes.
For some members of the community nixos.org stuff isn’t just a hobby. They use it at work, some in less key way, some build their whole business around it. That actually makes things harder in some ways.
For example, you can’t simply leave and stop using nixpkgs for another hobby, if you depend on it significantly – or if you like it too much 
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You can just… not visit Discourse and nix will be politically neutral enough. I personally wasn’t aware of any politics before joining Discourse and when I was just using NixOS blissfully unaware
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To expand on this, I’ve yet to find even a vaguely equivalent alternative - although a lot of people will tell you they have it. But there is none with the same capabilities, breadth of packages and hardware, and sheer amount of daily contributions.
To use a comparison: I’d never stop using Linux just because the Kernel Mailing List seems extremely toxic. Same goes for Nix/NixOS.
I think that it is easy to take for granted, NixOS isn’t just some trivial new hype distro, it’s not a dime a dozen. It’s very very special. It’s a paradigm shift. And Nixpkgs is in its own right a gigantic and hyper-productive open source project that you just wouldn’t find in a lot of places.
So since you wont just go and find this anywhere else, and since the effort it would require to bootstrap it yourself would be immense (and likely require years of using it before you’d have the experience) - not to even talk about getting contributors, getting to a equivalent state of the projects lifecycle - all that…
Well with all that in mind. If you e.g. believe:
I believe hobbies like ours should remain politically neutral to stay inclusive for people from all walks of life.
Then you’re way better of actually spending the time and efforts to reform the project if you’re the type of person like me that simply thinks there aren’t any alternatives yet.
Leaving can be the right choice, in the right circumstances, but many of those that have left the project did so out of apathy and demoralization. And the reasons they were apathetic and demoralized were because of the issues that are now considered “too political”.
And while it can appear initially as though “if only these darn people didn’t always cause trouble about this and that” then the project would be fine, with the right historical context, you’ll find that we’re all here not because we like arguing, but because we know that if we don’t, we may just have another mass exodus of contributors. And because we also just want things to work and to get on with hacking.
The price of being such a great distro is that there are many economic and personal incentives that emerge, and those incentives often goes against being inclusive and politically neutral. Right now, the project isn’t politically neutral, and many of the people that are called “too political” are actually just doing the hard work to get it to be more neutral, and less biased towards certain economic and political interests.
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I’ve observed the same when hanging out on the unofficial Discord community. The problem with that is people are incentivized to avoid the main community and resources therein as they don’t feel comfortable or welcome in the official spaces as a result of indirect enforcement of ideological conformity. That in my opinion is a reflection on how toxic the community is and how dire the need is for reform.
For me at least, the line was drawn when the ideological strife within the Nix community began negatively impacting the development and release of Nix. I personally feel that the project is no longer stable or safe enough to continue running in a production environment. There are alternatives such as Ansible and they may not be as extensible or elegant in their implementation as Nix is. But ultimately, confidentiality, integrity and availability matter for the people that use it.
I’m of the same opinion. Returning back to Arch Linux after years of using NixOS feels like going back to using something from the palaeolithic era. Sadly, I prioritise stability and secure above functionality and have done so as a consequence
I’m currently banned from the Matrix space and I can’t imagine that it will be lifted anytime soon after my participation in RFC 175. Even now, those within the community that don’t like what I have communicated in this thread have flagged it enough times that it has been hidden by default for those not logged in and has reduced visibility on the forum in general.
If I tried to my best to engage in good faith under the pretence returning the community back to the founding ethos of the free and open source software movement of anonymous meritocracy. I’ll likely end up facing character assassination, badjacketing, exclusion or outright banned from all Nix related platforms by those who stand to benefit from the state that the community is currently in.
I’m also not very well known nor a prolific contributor to NixOS and as such my opinion won’t likely hold as much weight with the people that matter. All I can really do at this point is highlight the negative patterns within the community and make myself clear that I have no intention of participating further unless they are addressed by those who can impart change in the community.
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while i may not have seen the full original post here…
politically neutral
i think this in itself would raise the question what this might mean - and one wouldn’t need to look far to find a different take on this.
one might for one interpret ‘politically neutral’ as not discussing certain topics.
but then, project governance faces certain decisions, so those would need discussing - at least within a governing body, perhaps more widely, if people feel the need.
then, community spaces may want to set certain boundaries to maintaining welcoming spaces, but then perspectives on those boundaries may diverge as well.
while it might be simple to say “just don’t do politics”, in practice the meaning of this depends on an implicit overton window, as well as on expectations of what the norm should be, which may differ by many factors like culture as well.
as such… i’m not exactly sure we have a choice but to discuss how we wish to treat each other and govern the project. that may well involve discussions such as this one, and may involve directions such as you suggested.
if anything, this may be one aspect on which one may judge current candidates for the upcoming SC elections.
but yeah, while people come from different walks of life we might not have a magic bullet here.
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Aaaaand… OP is suspended.
As they said themselves, they were already suspended, I’m assuming as part of this Update moderation-log.md · NixOS/moderation@10254d0 · GitHub.
The moderation log for that suspension is lacking significantly however, and I could imagine repealing a suspension that’s from 2024 wouldn’t be hard… That said, it seems the original author doesn’t seem interested in spending time on that currently, since they’re moving to Arch Linux.
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You are correct, and the community is divided because half the project believes in meritocracy, and the other half believes in equity. So how can these conflicting moral visions ever reconcile?
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generally, talking things over can help get closer to convergence.
anecdotally, i personally flipped on this question over the years, as i learned further about the world, started meeting more people, and tuned in to other perspectives.
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I agree, which is why I find the cavalier actions of the mods so upsetting.
that makes sense.
maybe live meetups would help a bit, tho there may be a geographical component to the gaps as well.
online, on the one hand i guess reddit had looser moderation for one.
i think dawn just started opening up a weekly thing for their podcast where people could talk, so that might lead to some further conversations as well - tho timezones might be a thing there still.
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Hi there! The problem with politics is that it still affects you in life. Here’s some of my examples with nixpkgs repository specifically:
- I was trying to download PolyMC (a fork of MultiMC), but it was removed from packages and rejected ever since for dubious reasons.
- Then I wanted to check out alternative X11 server implementations, but apparently it’s forbidden to talk about it, as issues and discussions are flagged.
- Maintainers of several packages either left due to drama or were banned.
Anyway, let’s turn this topic into something more productive: Is there any alternative to the NixOS ecosystem besides Determinate Systems one?
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I wouldn’t even consider detsys’ fork an alternative at all. They provide some features the community don’t, but it is the same nixpkgs under there.
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Preface: I’m trying to genuinely engage in good-faith, if you don’t believe me, please say so and we can immediately drop this discussion since we won’t reach a productive conclusion anyway.
In my experience most disagreements can be boiled down to a simple binary difference of opinion. It may take some digging, but generally this held true for me in the past.
So breaking it down:
- MultiMC was forked into PolyMC because of anti FLOSS practices, I don’t recall precisely the reasoning, but you didn’t mention that, so lets skip it. PolyMC was forked into PrismLauncher (which we have in nixpkgs) due to the main maintainer of PolyMC, without warning, removing the CoC, removing maintainers all in the name of “fighting left wing ideologies”. To me this seems like a valid enough reason, why doesn’t it to you?
- XLibre is ran by a person that thinks they know better than all the people working on X and Wayland. I understand a bit how Wayland and X work and I think that Wayland is better than X. X has fundamental issues in its architecture that are not worth fixing. Furthermore the maintainer of XLibre has shown hostility towards people they don’t agree with. It wasn’t the freedesktop.org people that were mean to XLibre at the start.
- This one is unfortunate. And I agree its a problem, though I understand why maintainers leave. I myself left most NixOS matrix rooms just to take a break from NixOS since this whole drama episode was giving me actual anxiety.
I’m genuinely interested in hearing more from you on 1 and 2. Hopefully we can find the 1 or 2 core boolean differences of opinion I mentioned.
EDIT: forgot to clearly state my opinin, whoops. I support both the exclusion of XLibre and exclusion of PolyMC personally for the reasons outlined above.
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SC has explicitly said that PolyMC is not prohibited from being packaged; by the time it got SC attention, though, the PR author seems to have switched to other things (I see a promise in the Nixpkgs PR on September 1, to update the author’s stance on review comments, but apparently the author has not found time since).
Fox XLibre it is more complicated, but even as someone who sincerely believes X11 has old pain points but Wayland is still a worse design on multiple very basic issues, I can buy the argument to avoid it under the same logic as the browser packaging restriction. I have looked at the XLibre upstream changes linked in some of the technical complaints (my initial attitude: «I don’t want to talk to the upstream anyway, but some of the design plans sound good»), and I agree that the linked things do not inspire confidence.
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