I’m one of the people who got confused by the nix vs nixos questions. Only now did I realise what was being asked (I think): do you use NixOS and/or do you use nix on non-NixOS systems. My mind went straight to “well, of course I use nix, I use NixOS, why is this being asked twice?”. If others were as confused or interpreted it like me, then the responses might be quite skewed.
Regarding the results, I find it curious that nix/NixOS is kind of “marketed” towards DevOps specialists, but less than a 5th of users identify as such. As somebody interested in such things, it is indeed unclear to me how to use nix/NixOS for deploying things for example.
It has been easier to present nix as something for developers to use, but the mix of nix-shell, nix develop, devenv, nigh completely undocumented yet widely used flakes just confuses them. I’ve stuck to “just use nix-shell if you’re making a package to be distributed and devenv if you want a developer environment”. Getting out of flake limbo / flimbo would be very beneficial as it seems devenv is built on top of it.
I also agree with the conclusion of the marketing team to scrap the “gender” question. @srid brings up a good point: why leave out the other group categories but keep gender? IMO, it’s irrelevant. If the nix community is welcoming and doesn’t treat others based on their appearances (which is difficult online unless you state it), it should be fine.
Thank you to the marketing team for the survey. Hopefully I’ll be able to participate next year 