Aha you mean this: nixarchy — Omarchy, vendored for NixOS This is not that bad? this is my fun side project to see if I can do this. Actually made some really good progress.
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@olafkfreund Omarchy in pure nix is the long term human goal which sadly the people Jack London warned us against in The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Iron Heel, by Jack London don’t have time for but, damn, “the Rails guy” does it again, uh? I have my doubts it’s the year of the linux desktop…
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Well said. And great book BTW.. But he is on to something when it comes to how it is build. What I love about Omarchy is the QML shell integration and how the plugin system works. Rest is just another take on stuff that others have done before him. But it looks good. Easy to use, and people love it. Now having this run on Nixos .. that is great. Adding nixpkg management into a QML shell that is fantastic. Creating plugins for devenv, microvm’s and more of the great features we are used to in Nixos that was the ultimate goal for me. Not everything is 100% done yet but this works pretty well for me and others as well.
I hear all these arguments that claim to be out of concern for the experience of the noob but I just hear elitism disguised as concern. It reminds me of my first experience with arch where it was considered a rite of passage to install it manually and the same argument was used against graphic installers.
Now that we have options for graphic installers and even entire pre-made setups like Omarchy, do we think Arch has ultimately suffered from all of the users these things attracted?
My opinion is that pulling in more people, regardless of their intent, is good for the project. Like others have said in this thread, NixOS is pretty attractive for this sort of use case (it was what lured me in) and some people will push through the rough edges for it and become proficient at it over time.
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So, with the most recent raise from Alibaba Cloud, Omarchy is now up to 21.7MUSD in pledges.
Every year since 2020 (according to my research), NixOS has raised comfortably less than 100KUSD per year.
Ignoring 12MUSD in rich 1MUSD donors (we’ll assume DHH has a good rolodex that would be difficult to replace), that still leaves almost 10MUSD in funding from corporations and other sources.
My question is: what can we, the NixOS community, learn from this?
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That money is a terrible metric to use when comparing how well two distinct projects are meeting their respective goals?
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That lesson will surely help pay server costs and compensate contractors and make it more possible to make a living maintaining NixOS.
I’m not saying “ha, look at them winning, we suck!”.
I’m saying “huh, this other new distro seems to have success–we can’t or won’t do certain things they’re obviously leaning into, but what other parts of their methods might be worth adapting or learning from?”
It may be that Nix doesn’t care about fundraising; that is certainly a novel policy position to take.
If we do care about fundraising and money, perhaps there’s something worth learning here.
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Why not just state outright what you think is worth adapting or learning from, instead of wrapping it in this fundraising-measuring exercise? Then we can evaluate those proposals directly on their own merits instead of smuggling in the assumption that because they bring in USD for Omarchy that they’re worth doing here as well.
We seem to be able to pay the bills we have, with a current balance that exceeds our current yearly expenses. That says ‘good enough’ to me; number-go-up, in Euros or bodies, is certainly not my motivation to be here.
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I do have some thoughts on this:
- having some people focused on it; currently the people devoted to going to companies/org and trying to solicit donations is fairly small or very much luck-driven.@ra33it0 and a few others do this; but it can become a more intentional thing. As an example; we got the CUDA team a build server just by asking (thank you Oxide!) and providing some user feedback. Much of our infrastructure and core support via Fastly, raw compute, AWS S3 funding and other critical things come from people advocating for the NixOS foundation for these things (thank you to @ron @hexa and other involved in such efforts!) We have started a few outreach lists a few times, but fundraising and obtaining donations is time consuming and often suffers from not having a dedicated set of people doing this work. We have lost some of our funding/hardware donation in the past purely because we didn’t respond to an email, or didn’t provide regular updates or simply forgot to provide a sincere “thank you”. Let’s put together a dedicated group for this.
- Reduce the hostility towards sponsors and the corporate world. NixOS is not yet (it would be amazing if we could change this!) in a position to go around demanding things from entities that have adopted Nix. We’ve had several companies that have tried to create an ecosystem around Nix; consultancies, service providers, and end-users. How many of these have we celebrated? Or have we alienated most of them (or a mutual alienation)? My impression is that there is a strong fear of corporate takeover; and this manifests sometimes into more than a reasonable concern and becomes outright hostility. To restate; our inherent antibodies against corporate takeover are so strong that I fear we are erring to much towards hostility.
- Getting money is sometimes easier than spending it. Deciding how to spend and on what and how to manage it is it’s own problem. See the @Infinisil ‘s PR from the Board here as one way to create a process for this. The CUDA team funding is also taking a long time to go from initial proposal to actually making it a reality. We need people with project management skills, accounting, sales + charisma, leadership and vision setting. Much of this is non-trivial and requires long-term dedication to do that is hard expect to happen on a volunteer basis. We need people like @fricklerhandwerk who keep quietly doing it behind the scenes.
- Our community is very good at operating “on the cheap”. It is a virtue. It’s actually something that I like - the spirit of self-hosting and being scrappy; but I have to acknowledge that many issues become simpler with some investment. As a historical learning point; when we lost funding for S3, there was a mad scramble with many complex solutions, but all of those took more work and maintenance and eventually got fixed by Ron cultivating a relationship and getting AWS to provide longer-term support. Let’s try to avoid future scrambles.
That says ‘good enough’ to me; number-go-up, in Euros or bodies, is certainly not my motivation to be here.
[@rhendric we’ve had this conversation before, so this is for everyone else] My goal isn’t necessarily to just make numbers go up. I want Nix to become an “immortal idea”. Maybe it isn’t Nix itself, but something very much like it is a net benefit to mankind. We need something like Nix to make it possible to reason about how software is built, deployed, and configured. I’ve not found a reasonable alternative. And getting adoption in critical places and perhaps simply by more people + places adopt we can make this thing immortal. We need people to be able to find jobs and make careers viable. I’ve had tons of individuals come to me with their primary criteria being just that they want to find a job, any job, where they can work with Nix. It’s the main question I get asked at conferences and meetups. I’ve had startup founding CTO/CEO Nixers say “I’d love to base my startup on Nix, but…..”. I’ve heard multi-national financial institutions say “Nix is technically the correct solution for us, but ….”. And that makes me sad. I want to create a thriving ecosystem and to showcase that (to go a bit fanatical for a moment) Nix is The Way.
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Side comment, but no. No, we’re not good at operating on the cheap. Every scrappy operation utilising Nix relies on two extremely fundamental assumptions for two equally expensive infrastructural components of Nix ecosystem: S3 cache and Fastly CDN.
These two are so damn expensive that no volunteer organisation can replicate them. That is why there is no viable fork of Nixpkgs.
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Regardless of whether we should fundraise more or not, the topic at hand was specifically about Omarchy getting funds and to that I can say - there’s not much to be learned, really.
The lesson is pretty much, if you’re a rich, loud asshole, especially a publicly visible and outspoken one, other rich assholes will happily throw money at you. And once you’ve had enough money thrown at you, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not many people in our community have millionaire and/or billionaire friends they can just shoot a twitter DM to saying “hey wanna give me a $1m for my pet project?” and receive $5m overnight.
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I do not think that is the lesson here at all. It is really easy to dismiss people that succeed and call them assholes. Even if they are 
The point here should be what can we ( saying we without really doing anything for the Nix community yet) learn and replicate how can we jump on the “The year of the Linux desktop” wave to get more traction and maybe solve some of the problems Nixos have financially
It is really easy to dismiss people that succeed and call them assholes. Even if they are
I don’t think he’s dismissing DHH here. He’s calling attention to the fact that DHH has a network of connections to capital, he has an audience of people who don’t seem to think he’s an asshole, and he wielded that to draw attention to his new project. That’s a completely different starting position from where Nix is at today.
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I do not think that is the lesson here at all.
I think that’s the lesson.
NixOS and Omarchy, are not in the same league.
NixOS is a powerhouse, revolutionary piece of technology, with an active community of volunteers putting their hearts and souls. I’ve seen the NixOS docs improve 10x fold since I started using it. Many others have been working on funding, infra, etc, etc.
A successful project, full of merit, little recognition.
Omarchy, on the other hand, is a template wrapper on top of Arch.
And yet, from the 2 of them, the one from the techbros circles receives funding… literally from the CEO’s. How are we supposed to have access to them?
Believing that because they have a good website/docs they are receiving all this money… Or that the NixOS community hasn’t tried or did a bad job at securing funding? Seems naive to me.
Arch for example, has been well-known for having a top-notch documentation… I don’t recall millions raining on them.
And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t continue improving. There’s plenty of room for improvement. I say keep it up to everyone, and let’s continue aiming for a more welcoming software and community. To the on-going documentation working group, excellent work. Every day I see new and improved things around the websites!
Cheers!
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And these aren’t just any “rich assholes”. They’re ideologically very much aligned with DHH.
Them supporting this specific collection of vibecoded dotfiles can’t be read as anything but a political move to strengthen explicitly the right wing minority in the open source community.
@tomberek some of those suggestions sound very reasonable and pragmatic to me on first glance, but if considered in the context of this thread they raise more questions for me.
Reduce hostility towards what sponsors? The only sponsorship I’ve seen significant hostility towards was the Anduril sponsorship, which was tiny and one-time, right?
This is relevant because you started working for them after the whole thing and because Palmer Luckey is another extreme right wing tech leader who made statements that he would like Nix to more closely align with his political views.
It feels bad bringing this up, but reading a number of highly competent people who were very enthusiastic about that sponsorship now responding enthusiastically to an Omarchy thread, encouraging less “hostility” towards “sponsorships”, like they did then, is really difficult to read as the simple, pragmatic, “apolitical” statements they seem like at first.
Without even token acknowledgment of the political side that is at the core of the project and a clear public stance toward that part of it, these kinds of comments read like covert endorsements with builtin deniability.
It’s probably a winning tactic to just never address any of that, but it feels insincere to me.
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The scare quotes are unneeded.
Many of us are very excited about corporate sponsorships of any kind–and right now, the people with the deepest and loosest pockets happen to work at places you might find objectionable. For our part, if Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund or Communication Workers of America or whoever decided that supporting the Nix ecosystem was of strategic value to them and wanted to shell out I don’t imagine we’d be any less enthusiastic.
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Did you really just compare unions with Anduril?
I long blocked you on GitHub already, but now you made me look up how to do that on discourse. It’s easy to do - and even better: It’s possible to entirely ignore a user with all their messages hidden. Great stuff.
My life just got better.
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I’m pretty sure the point was “look, if a union wanted to sponsor NixOS we [right wingers] wouldn’t complain [as opposed to leftist complaining about Anduril]”.
Not like that makes it any better, but it wasn’t about comparison - it was about proudly announcing that, despite denouncing DGB personally, he wouldn’t have objected to them sponsoring Nix.
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Not really a “right wing” person–there’s a reason I used Communication Workers of America as an example 
.
despite denouncing DGB personally
Again–where did I denounce DGB? Trade unions are fine. You’re hallucinating.
The point is that we want more sponsorship from wherever. The thing people (you two, evidently) are confused about is that because historically some companies that you don’t like were paying the bills you assume we support those companies–we support their paying the bills, not their causes or whatever.
My entire point was we’d be just as happy (happier, even!) if some other group was doing it…so long as the money flows.
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Probably because unions aren’t interested in destroying our NixOS community and people’s basic human rights. They’re not remotely comparable in how they affect their “opposition”, as Wolfgang pointed out.
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