Since the Nix community has been growing faster and larger every month, it’s gotten harder to understand who makes up the community and what everyone cares about. So we’re conducting this survey to improve our understanding of those questions. We hope to use your responses to develop Nix, NixOS, and Nixpkgs to match your needs and come up with new ideas for growing and serving the community. And we’ll publish major findings on Discourse and nixos.org.
All the questions are optional, and all responses are automatically anonymized. We will NOT collect your name, phone number, github handle, IP address, or any other identifying information.
The questions in the survey cover:
• Your background (e.g. What region of the world are you from?)
• The projects you use in the ecosystem (e.g. Are you using NixOS?)
• How you use the projects (e.g. Do you use Nix in production servers?)
• What you like and dislike about the projects (e.g. What do you think is already great about Nix? What should contributors focus on improving?)
This is our first time running a survey like this, so we’re also looking for feedback on the survey itself to understand how we can do this better in the future!
I already submitted but I’d like to add another huge suggestion for what can be done:
Advertise Nix as its own thing. Give it a website that doesn’t scream “OS”. Make it well known that it runs on any Linux/Mac alongside existing tools and doesn’t require a full migration of existing software.
When filling in the Nix section, make it clear that a NixOS section is coming afterwards. I had already entered stuff about “declarative system config” in the Nix section, only to then find out I should’ve kept that for the NixOS section.
Awesome! Nice job on the survey. I mostly missed home-manager being mentioned more prominently, but it does align with how I perceive it’s position in the Nix ecosystem. I want it to be an official standard Nix tool, but it isn’t atm.
Hah, this just happened to me. Ironically in the “what would you change” section I had just finished complaining about the naming of the language, package manager, and OS getting too confusing.
I’m pretty sure I started it this morning (CET) and then returned to it after an hour or so. Maybe I’m wrong and opened it (from excitement ) already yesterday evening before I went to bed, still it would have been nicer to get the session timeout immediately after clicking on “Next” on the first page and not at the absolute end of the survey.
Anyway I’ll probably not gonna do that again from my phone and use my notebook instead.
Just filled out the survey and before even reading your comment I said the same thing, home-manager should be made official. Most of the my config that directly impacts how I use and work on my machines is threw home-manager.
Last chance to share your feedback! NixOS Survey closes on Friday April 1st!
We’ve reached over a thousand responses! Everyone made an enormous effort and we plan to respect that effort by thoroughly reviewing every bit & piece of feedback that was shared. The output will be a key takeaway and survey summary which we hope will help further improve things across the board. This in turn means we would love (direly need) some help!
If you are interested in helping with the survey review please reply or send @ron(me) /@garbas /@tomberek a message.
I will share more info next week before we start diving into it.
Initially wanted some help to analyze the massive amount of open-ended question responses (~10k!). But we are almost at the end! Hoping to update soon!
We are planning to make this a recurring event (hopefully twice a year) so if you or anyone else is interested you can join the group.
Another effort for now if you are interested is gathering feedback about the survey itself so we can improve for next time.
) already yesterday evening before I went to bed, still it would have been nicer to get the session timeout immediately after clicking on “Next” on the first page and not at the absolute end of the survey.