I think it has been left implicit by most participants in this thread
that growth is important and to be pursued above all.
I’m not even convinced we should be pursuing growth at this moment in
time.
The Nix community is a healthy size already, and we’re getting lots of
good work done. I’ve already heard of several “NixOS hostages”, who are
now forced to use Nix because their company has committed to it, and
don’t get it or just plain dislike it.
I think that attempting to actively market Nix risks creating more of
those people, or other people who try Nix, become frustrated with how
things are today (language-specific package management, secrets
management, etc.), and then write off Nix into the future, even after
we’ve figured out how to improve those things.
So any marketing effort needs to be focused towards people who are
likely to see the potential in Nix, and stick with us despite our
current failings. Suggesting that we should have a graphical installer,
for example, is the opposite of this. People who can only use NixOS
with a graphical installer are, in my opinion, not likely to be people
who are willing to put up with Nixpkgs’ myriad little quirks and
annoyances, let alone its big failings, in its present state, and so I
think that such an effort to reach out to those people at this moment in
time is likely to just result in more people who permanently write off
Nix. People are much more inclined to give something a first try than a
second, and so it’s important we bring them in for the first try at the
right time.
At the same time, there are groups like Haskell or C++ programmers where
Nix is likely to be a huge improvement over other workflows. Reaching
out to those people is a good idea, because they are likely to have a
good experience, join the community, and stick around and contribute.
And so I think it’s important to bear in mind, rather than just “how can
we grow the community?”, what the potential risks are of reaching out to
people in any particular way.
My priority is not on getting Nix used by as many people as possible,
and I don’t think it should be anybody else’s either (even though that
would probably be the best for the consulting companies). Instead, my
priority is making Nix and Nixpkgs the best they can be, for all of us
existing users and for new ones. It’s easy to conflate those two
things, but sometimes they are actually at odds with each other, and we
need to be careful of that.
So I’d like to ask people the question: who should we be targeting in
marketing efforts, and who should we be wary of trying to target until
we’ve improved the experience they’ll have?