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Comment by trulyrandom | Hacker News Reader

I'm always excited to see developments in the Nix ecosystem, but I can't help but feel that this is a little bit tone-deaf. Nix flakes is a sensitive topic in the Nix community. Instead of spending time gracefully stabilizing the currently experimental feature, some of the core contributors to Nix apparently feel that doubling down and building a product on top of it instead is a better way to spend time.

In addition, we're invited to join the discussion on Discord, of all places, instead of the other two standard messaging platforms that the Nix community typically uses (Matrix and IRC)

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> I'm always excited to see developments in the Nix ecosystem, but I can't help but feel that this is a little bit tone-deaf. Nix flakes is a sensitive topic in the Nix community. Instead of spending time gracefully stabilizing the currently experimental feature, some of the core contributors to Nix apparently feel that doubling down and building a product on top of it instead is a better way to spend time.

Eh, they had a pain-point, built a tool to alleviate it, and shared it. I suppose the less tone-deaf alternatives are "keep feeling the pain (by not building it)" or "let everybody else keep feeling the pain (by not sharing it)." I can't complain too much with that.

> In addition, we're invited to join the discussion on Discord, of all places, instead of the other two standard messaging platforms that the Nix community typically uses (Matrix and IRC)

100% with you on this point.

As someone who is not listening in on the flake stabilization process, and who just wants to use Nix my thinking is, what's the alternative? To me it looks like people can either build on the feature that exists now, or put plans on hold for who knows how long while getting by with some lesser solution, passing up public enthusiasm that could be directed to growing the Nix ecosystem in the meantime.

I'm getting the hint that some people aren't happy with the current state of flakes. But right now it's the best solution for a certain large class of problems so it's what people are going to go with. Again, as a relative outsider I see flakes as The Way Nix Works with the requirement of enabling experimental features just being a part of the Nix process. Nix is rapidly growing in popularity with a lot of people drawing the same conclusion as me. Maybe there is a better alternative to flakes in the horizon, and when it's ready I'll consider switching. But I'm not going to wait to use Nix in the meantime, and for me the best way to use Nix currently is flakes.

In our opinion, flakes are the future of Nix and we're doing the hard work of using them extensively everywhere we can. While we do that, we fix bugs and papercuts along the way. I don't think flakes _can_ meaningfully stabilize without people pushing them to their boundaries and then addressing the problems that come up.

In other words, yes: we are doubling down because we don't see a future of Nix where flakes or something like them aren't central.

you guys seem very <ahem>, determined, to do things your way. I'm kinda new to the whole nix community and it just feels like you guys are a bull in a china shop. Maybe that's what it needs. Strong, opinionated, decisive, leadership. Dunno. All I can say is I hope, I _really_ hope, that you guys don't become, basically, Nix's "google". Defacto owning it to all of our costly detriment over time. It's why I'm tempted, despite their polish, to stay away from your products for the time being.

My feeling is we’ve been careful and considered about what we build and why, though I understand some folks don’t like what we’ve made. That’s their right, just like it is our right to build things we think are important and add value to the Nix community. We’re not in charge of the Nix project: Nix has its own governance and processes that we also engage with.

Most of our tools are open source, totally free, and don’t depend on us as a company continuing to exist. In many cases I hope the Nix project wants to adopt and take over some of our work — like the installer.

Our goal is to make Nix as good as possible, and do it together. In the meantime, it’s okay to not use our tools :)

Honestly, after seeing a little bit of how the sausage gets made and where the gridlock in Nix comes from, I think that's kind of needed.

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