The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded
discourse.nixos.org180 points by Meleagris 3 hours ago
180 points by Meleagris 3 hours ago
For anyone reading this and jumping to a broader conclusion: the Nixpkgs core team disbanding does not mean Nixpkgs or Nix is dying. It does mean that this particular structure was not sustainable, very important contributors burnt out and we need to do better, faster. We need to continue learning from this and continue building a stronger ecosystem that prioritizes the contributors who are the only reason any of this is possible.
Personally, I'm sorry and grateful. Sorry that it ended in core folks being burnt out. Grateful since they did some of the most amazing work, more than anyone can imagine two people doing.
The Nixpkgs Core team was established in Sept 2025 (https://discourse.nixos.org/t/establishing-the-nixpkgs-core-...), so it is a fairly new concept and idea. They've accomplished some good things as highlighted in the post, but are now stepping down. Yes, we'd prefer for the team to exist, but we've also functioned without one for ~20 years. It may take multiple iterations to bootstrap the concept and to figure out the right structure - or we may find it isn't needed. So no, this is not a critical emergency. It's a return to the status quo of late last year.
That being said, I think it is still a concept worth pursuing.
I agree with the concept but the name is terrible. "Core team" gives one the impression that this is the most important team to the project. It's not! It could be called the "governance facilitator" team or admins or something.
Please name the next iteration something less spicy.
> more than anyone can imagine two people doing
The core team was just 2 people and they disbanded?
There was also a steerco for just 2 people?
I’m now even more confused.
there are two distinct usesn of team/committee/council/etc in the software world, though they often get conflated. one is a formal structure to help with things like coordination and governance when many people are working on something, and it does seem a little silly to have one consist of just two people.
but the other usage is to create an entity, and say "this entity is responsible for so and so problem", and humans then sign up to be part of the entity as a formal indication that they are working on this problem. and in this sense of the word it's perfectly fine for a core team to be two people, and for it to officially disband when those people no longer want to be working on the problem for whatever reason. note that they did try to recruit new people to the effort, and if they had succeeded then the "core team" entity would have provided some sort of continuity to the project despite the original people moving on.
Here's the team's description https://nixos.org/community/teams/nixpkgs-core/. They were able to accomplish quite a lot of useful work. The steering committee is a separate organization (https://nixos.org/community/teams/steering-committee/) that contains more people and arguably accomplishes less.
There was a sweet spot in like 2024 when it seemed like everything was possible with Nix, but now it seems like everything “experimental” is permanently so (like flakes), packages I care about are not as fresh as I want, I have no mental recall for Nix commands…
Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something.
Reminds me of Bazel, in the way that it gets adopted by companies with developer support teams (because it solves real problems) but feels frustrating for us ordinary folk. Nixpkgs is kind of a critical part of “ordinary folk” and with the core team disbanding, I feel like my personal moves away from Nix (for projects) are proving correct.
I was lead on a Nix adoption effort for a few years that was kind of like that: it solved real problems, unlocked far faster, smaller, and cheaper builds than would have been possible any other way, and let us ship delta updates over crappy wifi connections to Linux computers on robots. Flakes were a perfect fit for our model, and we were just in time for stuff like up to date versions of cuda and tensorflow to be delivered via nixpkgs.
In my mind, Nix was unstoppable, and I particularly loved how empowered I imagined developers would feel. No mystery-meat CI scripts pushing packages to distant infrastructure that no one understands or even has the permissions to interact with, just the entire build system in one repo, trivially cloneable and hackable... add patches or build steps to anything and it's the same build as always, build it locally or send it to Hydra, it doesn't matter.
A devs "got" it and did leverage those things, used PRs to do safe evaluation of bumps to core dependencies, but I think on the whole it was regarded as cool but not tractable, and a few years after leaving, it sounds like plans are being laid to replace it all with something containers or whatever.
Very frustrating, particularly in a world where it should be trivial to identify the 5-10 typical tasks that people want to do with the nix code, and set up Claude skills to handle those. Given how easy and self-contained the build-test loop is, it feels like an almost perfect fit for agent-led development.
Meanwhile I’m over here with my 100 line flake.nix that installs system dependencies with direnv across hundreds of dev users and dozens of repositories wondering why everyone is all up in arms about boring and stable technology that solves a specific problem
Can you share more about what made you move away?
I’ve been running a NixOS based homelab for awhile now with 5 physical hosts and about 30 NixOS containers/VMs in an Incus cluster and I can’t imagine moving away from my central Nix repo and ability to rebuild/upgrade the entire fleet in one command and feel confident that things will work.
While I’m concerned about the disbanding, it would take quite a lot to make me look elsewhere, and there’s enough critical mass that I feel confident others will step up.
YMMV, I don’t run a home lab, I just have a NAS and run a personal website. I definitely don’t have a “fleet”. I have two servers running Debian and I can bring them back up from zero in <30 minutes.
“Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway. Maybe there is something I’m missing, but when I update the software, the updates come with changes and it’s possible that things break. My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break.
Regarding Nix complaints:
Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe you find something that is actively updated, maybe not. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off because the maintainer didn’t bother. Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons. What I want is just to know what level of distro-level maintenance the package has, including its transitive dependencies.
Docs are just kinda bad. Fragmented across different sites. Docs teaching you Nix forwards or backwards, or teaching old Nix, or teaching Nix with flakes, or teaching you Nix for end-users or developers or package maintainers, or Nix on Mac or NixOS. A surprising number of broken links. What I want is one site, with a little drop-down menu to select the version I am using. What I have is hours spent on the NixOS Discord trying to figure out how to do basic stuff.
> “Rebuild everything in one command and have it work” is not something that I’m chasing after and I am skeptical that it would work anyway.
I think I may see the confusion. I'm not using "rebuild" to describe recreating an instance from scratch, but in the "nixos-rebuild" sense, i.e. I can deploy a fleet-wide configuration shared by all hosts, or apply package updates across the fleet, etc.
On the topic of rebuilding from scratch, that's not a single command, but it's only a few. VMs/containers mount incus volumes (zfs-backed) for data storage, and a fresh rebuild is a matter of spawning a new instance from my homelab base image (I use OpenTofu to orchestrate this), running a nixos-rebuild targeting the new instance from my workstation, and things are back up and running. But I'm less focused on full rebuilds since I'm already doing Incus backups and can restore on any of the nodes in my Incus cluster.
> My goals are to keep reasonably up to date and to be able to fix things quickly if they do break.
My goals are similar. I can completely understand sticking with Debian for two hosts. I had experimented with NixOS for years but never really went all-in until I started expanding my homelab environment. A that point, NixOS just clicked and I'm far more productive with 30+ hosts than I used to be with 1-2.
> Package maintenance is kind of a crapshoot. Maybe your package is in nixpkgs, maybe there is a flake for it, maybe...
Which channel were you running on? And do you have any examples of specific packages? What you're describing just sounds foreign to me. I currently default to the latest stable release but if there's something that isn't in stable I'll override that specific package to use unstable. Much of the community just runs everything on unstable, but I prefer a slightly slower pace of updates.
Nixpkgs is the largest package repository across distros by volume, and as much as I love Debian, it's far more common to find things missing there.
> Maybe there is a package but half the features are turned off on macOS for unknown reasons
This sounds like you're branching into territory that can no longer be reasonably framed as NixOS vs. Debian (or other distro of choice).
> Docs are just kinda bad.
This is by far the project's greatest weakness. LLMs have been the saving grace. The frontier models are excellent at NixOS and I've switched to mostly having a conversation in my NixOS Claude project when I need info. This is in no way a defense of the docs, but for anyone motivated to use NixOS, there is at least a good option beyond the docs themselves.
> Meanwhile, my company is using Nix for everything heavily internally. Everyone gets their dependencies via Nix unless you are like using PAM or something.
Why doesn't your company fund development of nix and its associated ecosystem?
Is it really that complicated? I personally use direnv with nix to have per-project dependency versions installed automatically, and I’ve never had too much trouble. I know that the flake.nix files can become somewhat complicated, but mine have been pretty simple thus far.
I didn’t use the word “complicated”, maybe I’m missing something, but I listed some specific complaints and “Nix is complicated” wasn’t on the list.
Not OP, I’m not really sure what your specific complaints are based on the original comment. They seemed more like general/nonspecific concerns, which left the comment pretty open to interpretation.
I’m here in the thread and I can answer questions or elaborate on things, so if you want to know what I meant you can just ask me and there’s a good chance I’ll respond.
This resonates with me as well. I was really into using Nix for awhile but it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for a solo dev.
It gets worse when you are not a solo dev, and there's sufficient variety on people's setups. Oops, someone updated a version, and then built things for just their processor, and now I am stuck in a 20 minute compilation loop because some bad pin. Debugging Nix problems like those makes me think that old Gentoo Linux back in 2005 was easy and user friendly.
The way I set it up at my shop was that everything would build on your PR, and so by the time it merged, everything was already cached and no one should see a rebuild... at most a download.
Ha that is very funny. I also started thinking about Gentoo a lot as well which was a sanity check moment … “even Gentoo was easier than this” etc.
Agents are getting pretty good at Nix. I think it has sufficient critical mass that it'll be fine.
What is PAM in this context?
What does this have to do with installing packages?
I don’t have all of the details, sorry, but PAM is a bunch of .so that are dlopen'd and if you mess them up you lose access to your system pretty damn quick. I would tell people to just use the system libc but I don’t know the specific failure modes for using libc via Nix. Using system libc = building your project outside of Nix.
There could be similar issues with NSS but I think more people are ready to bypass NSS altogether.
“Our experience is that the Steering Committee as an institution lacks a native instinct for the delegation envisioned by the constitution, while also not being sufficiently engaged and cohesive to handle individual decisions at those levels itself.”
This is an almost poetic description of micromanagement. I really like Nix and have been running it as my main OS for several years in the past ~ 10 years.
I don’t think the issues they have are unsolvable, it just appears that the governance model they’re trying to have is not working out, and it’s very difficult to roll back.
Nix package manager: correctly resolves dependency hell for your entire OS.
Nix governance: still hasn't resolved dependency hell for humans apparently.
For a certain definition of "correctly" (namely: it doesn't, it just does what containers do and ships unique versions for every package).
I’m not saying it’s decisively correlated, or anything on its own, but there sure are a lot of anime avatars in this community.
Nix and NixOS probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the anime pfps :)
I do not like anime but holy crap do people with anime pfps make excellent software engineers and terrifying red teamers.
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The Internet was fully functional and full of competent people when it was a much weirder place. Converting all spaces into the equivalent of dress shirts and blazers doesn't reduce anyone's competence but does make the experience so much more drab. Let people like things.
I don’t mind the internet being a weird place and enjoy the weirdness that exists in places like the NixOS community. I’m fully aware that the software I use has been built by extremely smart people who seem to like anime. It’s just that my line in the sand is that if you are trying to share a serious topic on the Discourse, the anime pfp seems to undercut the message.
Why do you consider it so strongly to be inappropriate? It literally does not tell me anything about the user.
DOS was built in a basement. Pretty sure suit and tie wasn't the dejour whilst they were doing it.
Linux was a hobby project. Pretty sure that slacks featured more than a blazer.
I will tell on myself here but having an anime pfp evokes something childish for me and I do judge the user based on it. I expect to be judged similarly because I use the album art for a favorite album of mine as a pfp on the same platform and would consider it equally inappropriate if I were to share a heartfelt and serious message like this one.
Sorry for the snark, but would it kill you to change your definition of appropriate?
Can someone explain the ramifications of this to those of us not informed.
I’m in the process of about to deploy Nixos to server workloads, but am now hesitant because I don’t understand these ramifications.
This was a governance structure that began ~1 year ago. Nix is 23 years old, so it won't be dying or going away due to this. But it is sad to see two extremely valuable contributors leave the project due to burn out.
Nix and NixOS are two of the most revolutionary pieces of software in my experience. Hopefully Nix finds a governance structure worth of it.
I really don't think these issues are necessarily "systemic" in the sense that they've been ongoing for the last decade. I _was_ a long-time contributor until about two years ago when certain actors came into the community and started making a bunch of unnecessary drama. Since then I've seen some long-time friends in the community either slowly drop out or simply get ran out by a mob with pitch forks.
After being a heavy user of NixOS, I quit using it due to the communities instability, I don't trust it.
In my mind Nix is too strong of an idea and once this community finally self-immolates, someone else is going to pick it up (maybe Determinate) and it'll continue on.
What alternative have you moved on to?
I suggest giving Bazzite a try
I tried Fedora Silverblue and I found its notion/implementation of immutability fairly frustrating. It’s actually the reason I went to nixOS.
It seemed to me that it was all the friction of immutability without any of the benefits of reproducibility.
Very true.
I like the friction aspect to some extent because I think keeping the base system pure confers many benefits. But you’re right. Bazzite imposes a certain workflow. For installing new software …
1) try ujust first (since there is some porcelain provided for some things that can be challenging to install properly on immutable distros, such as Steam or DaVinci Resolve)
2) if that doesn’t work, try flatpaks from Bazaar/Flathub
3) if that doesn’t work, use Homebrew which installs into your home dir by default
4) use rpm-ostree as a last resort.
Functionally I find this has driven me towards a very devcontainer-centric setup. Of course in theory Nix can do better, but in practice I’ve found the combo Bazzite offers, not to mention the excellent hardware support, hits the sweet spot for me.
I'm convinced that some day bootc (or something similar) will be exactly what I'm looking for, but not yet.
My issue with Silverblue is that the unix exosystem was meant to be deeply collaborative ecosystem for programs. Meaning each program doing one thing and communicating with each other through various IPC mechanisms. Atomic systems with containers broke that.
Like I’ve created a rough media player with curl, jq, mpv powered by my subsonic server. The same issues happens with my emacs config which depends on various utilities. Yes I could create a main toolbox for all of that, but the whole thing was a bit cumbersome.
When I do want proper isolation, I create a VM.
All the posts about nix always go something like:
1. the "I used nix once/some time ago but I realized it's stupid/hard/whatever"
2. anime pfps/furries/trans/woke are bad
3. complaining about CoC/governance/etc
Irrespective of whatever the posted article is about relating to this technology. This is one of those threads.
Nix seems to have one of the worst discussion quality around here. Rust threads are similar (though they got better recently), specially on the negative unrelated comments side, but seem to have much more engaged people. Maybe Anubis has a similar ratio. I wonder why?
You're not helping though. If you want that to be different, focus on different things rather than bringing attention to what you're complaining about.
Anyone looking for a full source bootstrapped, multi-party-signed, container native, and deterministic alternative to nix, check out https://stagex.tools https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex
Isn’t this an apples/oranges comparison.
Nix/NixOS is fundamentally about a declarative system configuration.
And as far as I understand, StageX doesn’t have that.
You can define an immutable, deterministic, and bootable system image for anything from an enclave to a laptop with just the primitives provided by the OCI Containerfile standard.
A stagex containerfile can define a system build recipe in such a way that several competing build systems that obey the same standard can all get the same hashes, which we sign every release.
will nixpkgs still get updates? how will maintenance work (i am not familiar at all with the nix ecosystem so maybe this is a dumb q)
Maintenance and updates will continue as usual. The maintainers formerly on the nixpkgs core team aren't even stopping their individual contributions.
Nix sounded great, but actually trying to use it for personal use felt like a constant time sink. LLMs made it seem like their bespoke language could be side stepped and one could get all the benefits of the ideas without the time sink. But now they have drama, so I hope someone runs with the idea but for humans and possibly LLMs.
Even just reading this has more bureaucracy than at a company with hundreds of people. Holy hell some projects turned open source into committees and committees to decide what committees are needed.
Why is the Nix community such a dumpster fire?
If you've been part of an organization or a community that has undergone a big conflict or a schism, you'd understand. Plus this community largely communicates exclusively over text, which doesn't really work well for community repair. It's difficult to get people to feel OK with each other, or spend time together not arguing, when they only ever write intense letters to each other. Plus social work with technical people that spend most of their lives looking at a computer, not interacting with people face-to-face, does not exactly lend itself to socio-emotional maturity. Seems like in the case of Nix, the more mature people have repeatedly gotten burned out trying to tend to the mess and create a healthy community. It's extremely difficult to get someone to be humble, listen, reflect, and grow, when they are already upset and have their defenses up. And without our normal human tools or other trusted peers to help, like we can call on in real life, it can sometimes be near impossible.
Plus, in our highly individualized and hierarchical society, people don't have a lot of practice making decisions democratically, or coming to a consensus with people they disagree with. "Group projects" in grade school is pretty much the only time this happens during our socialization, which is incredibly sparse and inadequate. Anthropologically speaking, we should be doing this nearly every day.
https://jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Any organization is eventually controlled by people more interested in the organization than its mission. Or something to that effect.
(Accidentally attached this to the wrong post, meant for the post above this)
Technical people (or people with bad social skills) also love to inadequately and incorrectly try and turn the complexity of social organization into simple laws and rules. This kind of reduction doesn't really do people a service, and is also a bit arrogant and simple-minded. It would be much more interesting to name this as a tendency, and try to describe when and how it might occur, how the structure of the org might influence it, etc. Decontextualized takes projected onto everything like this are kind of misapplied and meaningless.
I know that it isn't always (heh) used as literally always and necessarily, but really there are no laws or always with human behavior. It's extremely dynamic and reactive. No organization will always do anything of such sort. I also like the word tendency.
what was the Nix schism? Did something like systemd happen? or like, Determinate/commercial vs Not? Or more like USA culture wars / code-of-conduct flamers (i vaguely recall some drama around a conference sponsor)?
anyways, i hope there’s a path to some kind of redemption and reconciliation in the future for the community. it sounds like it’s been Bad for years at this point.
The creator of Nix soft-forked it and started a company, that sort of inevitably leads to bad vibes I think
Can’t say I blame him, given the tone of some of the convos on the discourse site.
The most obvious cause was forcing BDFL and creator Eelco to step down
https://lwn.net/Articles/970824/
The moderation team posted an open letter demanding he step down, among other reasons this accused him of jeopardizing the safety of people from "marginalized backgrounds" and allowing "fascists" in the community
I have tried very hard to find any examples of what this is a actually referring to and genuinely have no idea
https://github.com/save-nix-together/open-letter/blob/main/c...
Because people who do good work get attacked left and right and noone steps up.
Honestly after seeing the last election results I knew bad things were coming. The worst of the drama instigators managed to get elected.
The post has nothing to do with the election drama you cite:
> These issues have persisted despite our repeated attempts to discuss them. This is, of course, a systemic problem rather than one any single SC member could solve; we don’t envy the demands of the role, have been impressed by the efforts of several members, and recognize that every individual naturally has limited time and energy and can only do so much in the context of a representative majoritarian committee.
I did. And half the post was them talking shit about the SC. Maybe you should read the post?
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