Official NixOS Wiki

We would like to announce our effort to create a new official NixOS wiki, further details can be found here:
https://github.com/NixOS/foundation/issues/113

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Is there a particular reason why you preferred https://wiki.nix.dev over https://wiki.nixos.org?

I believe that, since it is a wiki about nixos, the first domain choice would give a false impression to be only related to the nix language or the nix package manager, rather then nixos the linux distribution.

Also the second choice would make it more easly recognizable as official over the alternatives, since the domain is the same from which we have to download the iso to install the os and probably the first landing page for people searching nixos online.

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This seems to have been a result of the discussion on the GitHub thread. From what I understand, it is deemed likely that nix-adjacent pages about topics not strictly related to NixOS will be written there as well. Thus nix.dev is the more neutral option.

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I agree.

Given we want to merge the 2 domains into one (which we do), I would vote for nix.dev to be merged into docs.nixos.org as suggested by @Infinisil over at the mentioned GitHub issue. And retain nixos.org as the single canonical domain referring to any official resources. This is also what we might be progressing towards given this comment. This probably should also be reflected in the RFC regarding this if the RFC is going to be the path this domain change takes shape.

TL;DR: My rationale is that Nix is quite coupled with NixOS (at the development end), and NixOS includes Nix, not the other way around. And, using nix.dev will only further stagger the popularity and/or adoption of NixOS.

If I as a naive user were to go onto nix.dev, I’d have a good chance of never knowing about NixOS if I ended up not using Nix and only exploring it. Whereas if I visited nixos.org, I immediately know that NixOS is an OS and it uses Nix. Here, I’ll eventually learn that Nix can be used standalone as well. Even though this is a minor thing and that any user going into a good enough depth of Nix would learn about NixOS, but I think this is a point worth considering.

The nixos.org webpage also already teaches the user about Nix: Learn Nix | Nix & NixOS

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Is there a reason for not moving to a more modern software for wikis? nixlang.wiki is notably much easier to edit, backs up to git, and has integrations for drawio and mermaid if I’m not mistaken. It is also markdown and not the (to me) convoluted wiki language.

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Retaining mediawiki allows us to easily carry forward all the work of the previous wiki. As stated in the issue:

The software will still be MediaWiki, so we can retain compatibility with the old wiki. We already have the software, system configuration and backups available to port the data over.

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