Lix
lix.systems
Lix is an independent variant of the Nix package manager, developed by a team of open-source volunteers, and maintained by and for a passionate community of users.

https://chaos.social/@ktemkin/112392108881500298

https://chaos.social/@ktemkin/112392108893774195

This isn’t just a fork of Nix—this is the work of a team of 10+ people near-constantly since early February. (Technically, us too — but our task is really just enabling others.)

Some serious work has gone into ensuring it improves on upstream without having the regressions that have plagued them last three major versions!

And, since this will matter to some — it’s not a project of the NixOS foundation, but an independent organization that takes its responsibility to its community seriously.

    • @Laser@feddit.de
      4•7 months ago

      This is a fork or other form of replacement for nix as in the package manager. It does not replace NixOS, but can be used on NixOS and Darwin.

  • @chrash0@lemmy.world
    18•7 months ago

    i really want to like Nix.

    gave it a shot a few years ago, but i felt like documentation and community support wasn’t really there yet. this was long before Nix surpassed Arch in terms of number of available packages. now people still complain about documentation, especially of the Nix language. i see a lot of package authors using it, and that kind of tempts me to start using at least the package manager. but a lot of packages don’t. the allure of GitOpsing my entire OS is very tempting, but then there’s been these rumors (now confirmed) of new forks, while Guix splintered off much earlier. for something that’s ostensibly supposed to be the most stable OS, that makes me nervous. it also seems to have some nontrivial overhead—building packages, retaining old packages, etc.

    the pitch for Nix is really appealing, but with so much uncertainty it’s hard to pull the trigger on migrating anything. heck, if i could pull off some PoCs, i think my enterprise job might consider adopting it, but it’s a hard recommend for me today as it was 5 years ago.

  • @merthyr1831@lemmy.world
    2•6 months ago

    This is very cool. Im a fan of Nix from a tech perspective but im still not sold because of its poor UX, among many other complaints. IMO it’s the future of the Linux distro, but now that might be closer than before!

    • @Shareni@programming.dev
      8•7 months ago

      If anyone is willing to learn a little bit of Guile Scheme - look, the language is great, the project isn’t contaminated with multiple scripts, project skeleton is much better, the modules are well written, so why not move over there?

      The language is great, but the ecosystem is on life support, and I don’t see it getting anywhere close to nix soon. I believe it’s especially crippled by being Linux only and forcing free software to the point you’re not allowed to even mention the non-free repo in the guix irc.

      Random Devs and companies aren’t going to use it for their projects, and so there far less maintainers to solve issues like having a node version that’s not in maintenance for half a year and 4 major versions behind, or having automated npm package conversions.

      Realistically it’s currently only useful for a few languages with abysmal PMs, most of which are lisps, and like Haskell.

      • @Shareni@programming.dev
        1•7 months ago

        Now that I think of it, a guix fork would be far more useful than a nix one. You could forgo some of the FOSS extremism, and allow your users to install it without an ethernet cable, and maybe even on the infidel Operating Systems (even though guix is in the official repo for Debian + wsl).

        And I bet guile could really use the attention. AFAIK it’s mainly developed by one dude, and he made some impressive improvements. Just check out the release speeches on youtube, massive jumps between versions.

        Best of all, the GNU people could focus on building a better core, and choose to adopt only some changes, while preserving the purity of their system.

        • Sims
          2•7 months ago

          I believe https://www.pantherx.org/ is both Guix based and, I think, more relaxed on the non-guix issue. Don’t know much else tbh, but peeps interested can check it out.

    • lemmyreaderOPEnglish
      15•7 months ago

      https://forum.aux.computer/t/the-future-of-nixcpp-lix/483

      The announcement resolves one of my last fears for Aux: development on Nix itself. It is no secret that the number of people knowledgeable about the project and are willing to work on this CPP codebase is small. You have probably seen me mention multiple times by now that @sig_cli needs all of the help that we can get. Lix resolves this entirely with a trusted team of experts. This means that Aux is now able to remove Nix development from our priorities and can instead collaborate with Lix moving forward.