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Usually when popular projects have this much turmoil there a fork.

Centos stream

Node to deno

Etc etc

Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way gravitate towards that and those that don’t stay. And boom. There’s peace again.



> Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way gravitate towards that and those that don’t stay.

v.s.

> Why hasn’t there been a fork of nixos? And the folks who want to do things in a certain politically leaning way stay and those that don’t gravitate towards that.

now let's spend the next few years arguing which of these is the correct proposition.

sure, it's more complicated: there's questions about _what_ to fork (Nix is an _ecosystem_, not necessarily a single repository), there are certain things which can't trivially _be_ forked (e.g. a multi-hundred-TB S3 cache that's actually critical infrastructure; project websites, wikis, uncountable automation services). how do you coordinate all the details of forking, if forking isn't actually as trivial as pushing the "fork" button? that requires highly capable leaders, and if the ecosystem were good at finding and promoting that type of leader, then it wouldn't be in this place to begin with.

more optimistically, various parts of this ecosystem _have_ been forked, or reshaped, by various entities. things happen; sometimes that happening is just a lengthy process.


Seriously, you'd think NixOS users would rank especially high in willingness to fork something they considered less than ideal.


Imagine Bazite's mascot made a distro, well that distro would be NixOS's fork and it's called Lix (https://lix.systems/). When they kicked Eelco Dolstra out of his project (NixOS) Lix became redundant so they stayed in NixOS. Also google is your friend.




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