Long term roadmap

Does nixos have one? It works fine for me as is and don’t see much margin for improvement but there are rough edges around FHS binaries and wine games that I’d love to see working.

Does nixos ever think that no this is not my target audience? (Realistically only programmers are but I think effort towards changing that may not be fruitful) .

What are currently things that nixos wouldn’t do well? I think most production people using Debian for security and stability would hesitate to use nixos.

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Does nixos have one?

There is no roadmap, but i think it would help the project to have one.

I had a discussion about that 2 days ago: davidak: "@musicmatze@mastodon.technology yes, we should be…" - chaos.social

there are rough edges around FHS binaries and wine games that I’d love to see working.

There are a lot of rough edges, but we have an active community and it get’s better with every release!

You might be able to run FHS binaries with steam-run. There is also appimage-run.

According to that, Wine should work.
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Wine

For games, Steam with Proton might work better. There is also protontricks, lutris and playonlinux, but look for open issues on GitHub, they might not work properly.

Does nixos ever think that no this is not my target audience? (Realistically only programmers are but I think effort towards changing that may not be fruitful) .

I always say it’s for “advanced linux users”, but i would also like it to be more user friendly.

There are discussions about that: User-friendly NixOS distro?

A big topic in that regard is improving the documentation: Documentation improvements

What are currently things that nixos wouldn’t do well? I think most production people using Debian for security and stability would hesitate to use nixos.

Good question. There is an open issue on that topic: Update State of NixOS · Issue #285 · NixOS/nixos-homepage · GitHub

I think it’s pretty stable and security is also quiet good. I use it on all of my desktop systems and servers. But we need more contributors to create, update and merge packages. I think debian or arch have way more, so it’s even more impressive how far we got with our approach.

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Here’s a roadmap for Nix (not NixOS):

There’s also this effort by @zimbatm:

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Does nixos have one?

There is no roadmap, but i think it would help the project to have one.

I had a discussion about that 2 days ago: davidak: "@musicmatze@mastodon.technology yes, we should be…" - chaos.social

I’m not sure one big roadmap would be helpful for Nixpkgs – in my
experience, it’s largely developed by people interested in addressing
problems for themselves and others. Nixpkgs is shaped by the work that
people choose to do, and I think a roadmap in this model would just fall
behind and go out of sync with what was actually happening very
quickly. And then we would look bad for not following our roadmap. :slight_smile:

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I have to agree, it’s much more an essence similar to creative chaos :smile:
Perhaps the purpose trying to be communicated is there’s efforts going on in nixpkgs that people could be a part of? I’m not sure nixpkgs could have long term goals, but at the level of Nix the tool and the design of NixOS there could be a larger roadmap. nixpkgs encompasses so much, you’re more likely to see a group of individuals formed on a particular goal. And perhaps they have an organized roadmap that prospective contributors can be made aware of.

A good example would be deterministic builds in nixpkgs, if someone were to ask me “what’s nixpkgs roadmap and plans for deterministic builds?”, how would you respond to them right now?
Personally, I’d try to find a way to direct them to the people who are interested in this and suggest contacting them and possibly collaborating. Now that makes perfect sense right?
A roadmap in that context is simply the substance of a group of individuals goals towards that particular achievement.
(I also encourage people to act like networkers in nixos, it helps out a lot connecting people)

I feel like the most aligned intention would be broadcasting efforts in nixpkgs so others can join in, and so we can collectively claim these efforts.

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Great comments so far :slight_smile: I thought the “What are your goals for 19.09” thread was great as you got to see what people are interested. I’m liking forward to someone making a 20.03 version of the thread and seeing the responses!

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