In short, 2022 was an incredible year for Nix.
Let us highlight what the community has achieved this year, and what we could do more of in 2023.
The Marketing team and the Nix 20th Anniversary task force are also preparing some marketing materials, and will take the opportunity to amplify what we all care about most. The main goal: growing our community.
We - the Nix community - are a large and diverse group, working on almost everything – from particle accelerators to building a static websites and more. Therefore I would love to bring together as many different perspectives and collect a truly representing overview of what happened in Nix in 2022.
Please bring up your ideas and discuss the top Nix things that happened across 2022!
What did you find most important and why? As usual, vote with your .
If there’s a PR, announcement or blog post associated with it, please also provide a link.
Some topics to kick off the discussion:
Noteworthy releases, bug fixes, new features, contributions to Nix, Nixpkgs, NixOS, …
I am going to be unoriginal and say NixCon is Paris was definitely the highlight of 2022. It was great seeing (almost) everybody from the community in flesh after all these years/months.
I didn’t learn much technical stuff as NixCon was mostly an excuse for me to hang out with the community rather than listen to talks which I could’ve done from home. What I did learn was more about the community members themselves, what they do IRL, what’s their experience with nix and how they stumbled upon it initially. In other words, I just got closer with the community members.
Not sure if this can make the list, but I’d at least like to tell more people about it: Every week I’m hosting the Nix Hour, an open session where anybody can ask questions about Nix and I’ll improvise a small lecture-like answer around it. All sessions are recorded and available here. I’m very happy to see these sessions helping people learn Nix and I intend to continue holding them every week
Maybe this is a bit of a Special Interest Group achievement, but being part of the Nix community and exploring and improving the DevOps space with Nix (with actually not quite a nix-maximalist approach), std has matured enough to proficiently cover the SDLC (yet w/o ALM — but underway) with both very good lead & cycle times.
This is a great & maybe undervalued achievement for nix adoption in professional setups under deadline pressure.
I won’t link anything since comms & docs need lots of love and rework before v1.0.
TBH, I really liked the NixOS Community Survey. NixOS Community Survey 2022 I think it’s nice to be able to point to for a taste of how some are using nix; and for (tbh) the key themes in responses.
I’m not sure who’s responsible for this, but a few months ago a bunch of useful Nix packages involving filesystem watching were flat-out broken on macOS, such as watchexec, cargo-watch, and Vector but surely others as well. Then one day they just magically worked again to the great joy of me and many of my custom dev environments Was this the most consequential event in Nix world in 2022? Likely not! But it shows that Nix is an ecosystem where even smaller improvements can resolve major downstream problems and unblock thousands of people. Kudos!
The Nix team starting to unblock the cornerstone of the ecosystem,
flake.parts, originally an experiment in doing distributed module development, catching on organically,
Improvements to the module system (because of flake-parts) turning out to be very useful in other areas as well (quality of life improvements such as error messages and some fancier module features: extendModules, deferredModule, moduleType; do be careful with those),
We’ll most likely complete the last parts of the transition to markdown docs this year; specifically the NixOS options,
The other teams! The community is more decisive now, which is awesome,
Hercules CI growth, despite putting a lot of time and energy into community projects ,
Fixed four distinct Nix crashing and throwing bugs. 3 of them before I was asked to join the Nix team,
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Was this the most consequential event in Nix world in 2022? Likely not! But it shows that Nix is an ecosystem where even smaller improvements can resolve major downstream problems and unblock thousands of people. Kudos!
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