NixOS logo / mascott name and story?

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Hello, does the current snowflake logo made of lambdas has a story or a name?

The current logo (at least the way I see it), looks quite lambda (:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: ), my take on this is it would be good to give it some character.

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I love the logo.

As a devout member of The Alonso Church - I wouldn’t change a thing :pray:

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The previous version was taken from a losing proposal for Haskell:

EDIT: though you’re probably asking for different things.

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Nix is latin for snow

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that’s interesting :slight_smile:

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It took you pointing it out for me to spot that those are lambdas.

Where does the snowflake part of it come from?

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There is a bit more context on the wiki page: Haskell logos/New logo ideas - HaskellWiki (search for “snowflake”)

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I’m not sure if this was historically intentional, but I like the connection that ‘nix’, in Latin, means ‘snow’. Also the ‘uniqueness’ of both store paths and snowflakes a nice parallel.

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FWIW, I learned Nix and Hydra are moons of Pluto

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A treacherous water-spirit; a nixie.

And there are more: nix - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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I suppose, but it feels a bit weird to have symbolism for what is ultimately an implementation detail. Hash functions aren’t exactly unique to nix.

Personally I associated it with it being one of the more flexible tools for reproducible systems, allowing you to generate systems that are similar but not the same much more easily than comparable tools.

Surprisingly easy to retrofit symbolism to a logo, heh.

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Discovering and naming the moons happened after our Nix was published (with that name). And that’s what inspired our “Hydra” name (also “Charon” as earlier name for NixOps). At least these are my understandings… it’s easy to confuse or misremember this.

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The origin of the name Nix is explained in this abstract https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220900529_Nix_A_Safe_and_Policy-Free_System_for_Software_Deployment
see footnote 1 page 81

The name Nix is derived from the Dutch word niks, meaning nothing; build actions do not see anything that has not been explicitly declared as an input

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nixops was previous call Charon , believe it or not.

I like Charon, better than nixops any day of the week.

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The story could definitely have a bit more lore and consistency for marketing purposes and definitely not a footnote in a paper on researchgate… So the latin origin is not not explicitly stated , other than the obvious connection to Haskell.It may be spun like - it shows progress, generational nature of nix etc.

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