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.

  • @Shareni
    16•1 month 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.

    • velox_vulnusEnglish
      8•1 month ago

      Right now, I am struggling because of unemployment and job shortage in the tech-market, but I’m planning to share my own patches to essential software, like you’ve mentioned - probably within the end of this month. I think projects like Node, Ruby and Python need to be maintained well enough.

      So if I have a chance to, I’ll probably work on either one of them, especially Node - that seems to be quite dated, and they’ve also skipped on v16, which hurts people who are still on it and don’t want to migrate immediately - because there’s no inferiors to pin to - while there’s multiple commits at least for 10, 14 and 18. Working on it would make Guix convincing as a third-party system package manager. I don’t know the state of Ruby or Python, but Zig seems to be in a decently good condition. Rust may be removed probably to avoid trademark violations, or they’ll probably create a fork and rename it.

      About the FOSS extremism, it is not that bad, and I honestly like it the way they’ve maintained it - in a way, it is very similar to how Fedora separates their free and non-free repositories. This is not to say that there’s provisions for no non-free drivers - in fact, I personally use them for my Wi-Fi drivers to work correctly. Given the state of FLOSS-respecting Wi-Fi hardware, Wi-Fi 5 devices still don’t have their respective open-source drivers, so 6, 6E and 7 are still going to be unsupported for a long time with the libre kernel. For folks who want to setup a working system easily, nonguix ISOs are readily available, so that would probably be the best place for anyone to start at.

    • @Shareni
      6•1 month 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
        3•1 month 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.

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 month ago

        I would be for that fork. I used Guix a long time ago and got really frustrated with non-free and binaries. Guix is really nice to use though and it’s fast.