HACKER Q&A
📣 gigatexal

What was Nix's big turning point?


Nix seems to have blown of up late and become a darling of uber-linux users and even folks not happy with package managers on MacOS.

My question is: Does anyone know if there was a single news article, blog, youtube video, influencer that took the project that's been around for a decade+ to gain so much mindshare? Or was it just an organic thing brought on by the containerization stuff?

  👤 olodus Accepted Answer ✓
I think it was an idea who's time had come. Declarative WoW has been gaining momentum as git has been incorporated into more and more dev flows (ex: CI automation declared in repo is now standard). Nix or Guix is just a natural extension to that. Maybe combined with some general dependency-hell frustrations out there. I agree that it feels like the popularity has increased a lot recently (though I don't think I have any real evidence for that more than personal experience) but I would personally just put that down to a slow organic growth over a long time which suddenly pushes a technology closer to the mainstream and then there could be a sudden inflection point of attention to it. Maybe network effect is the better description.

Sudden increases like this also often comes with a bit of a counter wave. See the "RIIR" jokes for example. I can definitely understand those feelings. It is annoying when something is brough up constantly and talked about as a panacea to everything. Nix will (and already have had) this quite a bit. Especially since nix probably deserves criticisms more than most. Even with flakes it is still very hard to understand and can limit the amount of people able to make changes to the build pipeline. To these critics I can just say that I understand and that it is perfectly fine to not switch to nix. We are just trying to find solutions to problems we see and have had in our projects, they might not be good solutions problems existing in yours.

👤 notemaker
I don't think there's a single point of origin. Personally, I found my way to it through hacker news ~1 year ago where multiple interesting articles about nix suddenly started making their way to the front page.

As for why people have started adopting Nix/NixOS at an increasing rate, I think a lot of ut boils down to the maturity of nixpkgs. It's very quick to just get going.