Short Summary of the Community Drama of the Linux Distribution “NixOS”, so that you can get the big picture and form your own opinion with the provided sources.
Clarification of the “Steering Comittee” as Project Leadership
Moderation Team resigns in Protest
- Resignation Post, with examples of interference: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-the-moderation-team/69828
- Conflict due different interests:
- the Moderation Team desires being independent. otherwise, they can’t moderate the behavior of people in positions of power.
- the Moderation Team is currently accountable to the Steering Comittee: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/a-statement-from-members-of-the-moderation-team/69828/6
Technical Leadership works for Military Company, causing Fear of Alignment with Facism.
- Steering Committee works for Military Company https://discourse.nixos.org/t/sc-member-tomberek-works-for-anduril/68971
- People in the community feel uncomfortable with that, since the US and its military are heading towards facsism: https://mstdn.games/@KFears/115275676459535171
- The Steering Committee made a public Post about that, explaining the Situation: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/statement-on-a-steering-committee-member-joining-anduril/69007
whenever I asked about something in irc I got fairly swift and very helpful responses 🤷
I was trying to package Typst for them once. The IRC barely gave me any help, nor did the mailing list, so I had to guess a lot of things on my own. I ended up spending several hours working on it and fine tuning it to what the documentation wanted as much as I could. Then I finally made the submission, which was ignored for an entire year, before finally being rejected. It’s clear that the package repository has a severe lack of packages, but if there’s no clear way to contribute, then idk how anyone can take the project seriously.
I’ve also encountered bugs that made the tools unusable on my laptop that similarly got no response on IRC and the mailing lists.
Meanwhile on Nix, if I submit an issue on Nixpkgs, it will usually get resolved by the maintainer in 24 hours, or at most a week if it’s a larger change, and I don’t even have to do anything, and things aren’t constantly broken on aarch64.