I'm a user of Nix for about seven years and finally decided back in March, during the second rehash of $sponsor controversy, that I'll stop investing and move away from the tech as soon as I have a suitable replacement.
I've been critical of Nix for a variety of reasons along the way but one of those reasons is how so many people (and consultancies) seem hell-bent to set up their own little fiefdoms within the community.
The community is already niche, we certainly didn't need people purposely driving further fragmentation and incompatibility with these frameworks with bad bus factor and NIH designs.
I've seen a lot of tribalism and cargo culting around some of the other efforts in this vein, too.
I believe Snowflake is one of Jake Hamilton's projects. He's trying to make Nix more approachable through GUI tools etc.
Unfortunately, he's also part of the mob that chased the founder out of the Nix project and decided it should be yet another battleground for identity politics.
Like you, seeing the community entertain these stupid political fiefdoms makes me want nothing to do with NixOS.
However, I might stick with it out of laziness though until SteamOS runs on 3rd party hardware. The Jovian project is a Nix-based SteamOS clone that's been working well on my Legion Go, and I don't want to spend the time back in tinkerland finding something to replace it.
Let me be very direct - I disagree quite a lot with your characterizations in this post. If anything, I am probably much more closely aligned with Jake's "personal politics", since I also signed the first open letter about rejecting military sponsorship for future events. I felt the second open letter was not well thought out or well argued, so I didn't sign that one, but I do think it's clearly a net positive for Eelco to step way way back and that he has been in no way contributing to healing or progress during this debacle.
I resented people building fiefdoms because they're often commercially motivated and used to drive consulting engagements. They fragment the community on a deeply technical level, ruining code reuse and interoperability, for negligible technical improvements. I don't have any idea what the authors' views on project governance or human rights are, that wasn't a factor for me.
> it's clearly a net positive for Eelco to step way way back and that he has been in no way contributing to healing
Just let people do their thing. You’re not a bad person if you have nothing wise to say about people being hurt, and lots to say about resolving dependency constraints.
> fragment the community on a deeply technical level, ruining code reuse and interoperability
Most Nix consultancies I encounter make highly reusable flakes. flake-parts, flake-utils, fenix. They have a small commercial spot in their package’s namespace, and the first reason you look them up is “I wonder if they’re doing other smart Nix things that I can copy”, and they usually do.
You're not a bad person, but you might be a poor leader in that situation, which, as I understand it, is the main focus of the complaint. There's a difference between letting people do their thing, and letting them lead a large community of developers despite that not being their strength.
> While the foundation board was never intended to lead the community, we cannot deny that it is perceived to be in that role by many, and we therefore take full accountability. [...] Eelco is the principal author of Nix and undoubtedly a central figure in the ecosystem that grew around it. We confirm that Eelco showed no intention to be perceived as or act like the BDFL of the Nix ecosystem, or the Nix code base. *To commit to that in a timely manner, he has decided to formally step down from the board. This decision was made amicably and in mutual agreement with the board that this is the right thing to do.* Our collaboration was always characterised by our deep respect for Eelco’s work and our awareness of his lasting impact on our lives.
Fwiw, I'm not a Nix user nor am I really following the whole discussion here. I'm not trying to spread "FUD", just point out that there's a difference between "bad person" and "bad at the role one is currently in".
That said, as a complete outsider, the quote "the foundation board was never intended to lead the community" is wild to me. It sounds like the director of NASA going "I never intended this role to have anything to do with space". I think I understand the meaning behind the sentence - they wanted to support the community, but that the community leads itself in some way - but I can also see why the community would see them as having that leadership role that they apparently wanted to avoid. I also don't understand why someone who wanted a purely technical role would ever be on that board in the first place.
Like I said, I'm not really following this debacle, and I don't know the details. I'm just amazed at that quote, which seems very revealing to me.
You seem to be unfamiliar with the situation, then. The sponsor wasn't for NixOS itself, but a related in-person event. NixOS had existed for literal decades prior to this.
I highly doubt he would reject DARPA as a sponsor for NixOS. This was just celebrated by a bunch of safety people that have significant overlap with NixOS security goals: https://www.darpa.mil/program/translating-all-c-to-rust
You don’t understand that meme. DARPA is direct military money for a bunch of tech people are happy with supporting. They just pretend it’s not the military so they don’t have to have any hard moral conflicts.
Sponsorships are generally acknowledged with quid-pro-quo advertising opportunities - otherwise they'd be called silent donations.
In the case of tech conferences like the inciting incident, that means your logo everywhere, maybe an ad spot in between talks, and booth space. You might get some intangible reputational benefits from whatever other sponsors are present if they are viewed as highly prestigious or respected. Might even have opportunities to do a talk by one of your employees, we've all been to conferences where a vendor conspicuously also has a talk that coincidentally features their products heavily. All in all, it can elevate your perceived legitimacy in various ways.
Advertising might get you more business or more applicants and thereby grow your reach and success.
In terms of my personal values I'm a pacifist. I don't want to see something I like(d), something I made modest code contributions to, used to advertise for a commercial military organization that manufactures equipment for violence. It's the same way a vegan probably doesn't want to see advertisements by the beef farming industry or that someone who cares about renewable energy and sustainability doesn't want to see sponsorship by someone whose holdings are a huge stake in coal mining and fossil-fuel power plants.
In the case of the inciting incident, it wasn't a case of massive dollar amounts, it was ~$5k USD and it wouldn't have jeopardized the conference at all to say no thank you.
Yeah, it makes sense if you're a pure pacifist, the "all violence is wrong" -type.
I'm more of a pragmatic pacifist myself, which allows or even carefully supports violence for suppressing violence. I believe the USAF is generally speaking aligned with me on that. Which is why I'm not unhappy when they work with FOSS.
I think the opposite of pragmatic pacifism is the military-industrial market. The expansion and brinkmanship of weapons development brings out the absolute worst qualities in privately owned businesses. If you think lock-in is bad when it's your phone or email account, imagine how horny investors get suggesting DRM for hand grenades. This escalates because the goal of defense companies isn't to defend America, but to make as much money as they can get away with.
I'd like to think that I'm pragmatic as well, which is why I won't deny that NixOS would likely get used in conflict with or without event sponsor deals promoting it. However, if your in-person events pivot from a technically-focused gathering of like-minded individuals to a war council bankrolled by Anduril, I'd expect most attendees to be angry. Especially once you consider that the United States sponsors the export of weapons to countries that don't use violence for justifiable or proportional causes.
The second letter saying TL;DR "fuck you Eelco, kind regards". I'll never understand the motives here. Never. Please let me know when you've spent decades creating something and I'll be sure to shit all over you in kind.
I don't know much about it but that summary seems completely unreliable:
* it reads like the result of 'there was a power struggle and my side lost'
* it falls back constantly to overly simple cause-and-effect answers to complicated problems
* it clearly is trying to paint certain people as villains and dissecting their imagined motivations while excusing or ignoring the motivations of others
Interesting, but not convinced of its impartiality. There's a strange attempt here to link labour union organising to social activism, which is incorrect and ahistorical. And also irrelevant to nix, which is a community rather than an employer.
Individual union organisers might also be social activists, but effective union organisers know that they need to a appeal to all employees regardless of their politics. And historically unions have been just as socially unreconstructed as companies, and subject to the same process of social activists pushing for their reform.
> Individual union organisers might also be social activists, but effective union organisers know that they need to a appeal to all employees regardless of their politics
One need only look at labor's reaction to the Teamster's president's speech at the RNC to realize that this is clearly not the case.
When a person is deeply involved with something that turned into a conflict and then they write their history of it, as is the case with the link above, then I would say that framing them as a 'reporter' is not accurate.
Out of curiosity - what makes you think that the author of the link above, Chris McDonough (incidentally an author of the Pyramid Python web framework), is "deeply involved" with the NixOS conflict?
It is a firsthand account of someone in the community. They referenced no sources and gave a description of events based entirely on memory. They claimed their own involvement and interest in the outcomes.
If the person is involved in a situation and recounts a history from their perspective it is not reporting. It doesn't matter whether you think they did a good job or not. A combatant in a war writing their evaluation of it afterwards is not 'reporting' and neither is what he did.
An analogy is not a literal comparison between two things. It is a way to describe something by pointing out relationships between things and comparing the relationships. It does not literally compare NixOS with a warzone.
Putting aside the accusations of activist ideology, this paragraph seems key:
> At a properly run company, if you are caught eating someone else's sandwich from the fridge, your boss will confront you and say "hey, Bob, don't eat Ted's sandwiches." That will be the end of it. In an organization with weak leadership, however, the entire company will receive an email from HR in the afternoon dictating a company-wide seminar on sandwich theft prevention, a #sandwich-theft chatroom will be created, posters depicting sandwich thieves in an encircled red X will appear on the walls, etc. The latter is more akin to what happened in the Nix case I outlined. There was no leadership in place to deal with an isolated sandwich theft, so it now needed to discuss policies with the goal of ending sandwich theft forever and punishing all sandwich thieves globally.
As an outsider, it looks like Nix had a weak leader who refused to mediate differences between people. He didn’t do what was right and just. His problem, and his irresponsibility, became everyone else’s problem and responsibility. A power vacuum but also a moral vacuum.
> As an outsider, it looks like Nix had a weak leader who refused to mediate differences between people.
As someone who closely observed all of this over the months, I can confirm that this was exactly the root cause of the whole issue. 4 out of 5 of these leaders eventually burnt out and quit.[^1]
The new governance structure, despite the rough start[^2], hopefully will solve that and create an actually caring leadership.
Without knowing the specifics: I doubt a governance structure will produce good leadership. I've seen Rust people place their hopes in abstract, convoluted processes, and they've failed repeatedly.
Rather, I see the problem as character. The chosen leader(s) need the internal, personal qualities necessary for getting volunteers to cooperate well. External structure won't save the project if leaders lack character, it will just slow the damage they can wrought.
Relatedly, I was uncharitable before in emphasizing the weakness of Nix's leader. I think we all lack the moral (apolitical) education necessary for just leadership.
Power tripping. Ever wonder why projects become "foundations" with heavy emphasis on non technical bureaucratic bloat, committees, forums, "community managers" with way too much power and so on?
The main reason to become a foundation is to have some legal entity to deal with money. Some times projects get grants or donations or google summer of code mentor payments, and that can either go into a random account of whoever happened to be in contact with the donor, or it can be properly managed by a foundation with agreed-upon guidelines on where to store money and what it can be used on.
The end result is fragmented projects, worse developers and less activity. Congratulations. You got your social point across to the detriment of everyone.
Bazzite and ChimeraOS are good contenders for that use case if you weren’t aware of them, to the point that I am plannng on using one for setting up a system as a “gaming console” for a family member and an email howto should be good enough for minimal tech support on my part.
Just setup ChimeraOS on an 8845HS box this past weekend and really liking it. I do wish there were a few more emulators configured in the box, and there are some rough edges (the second activated controller is always controller 1 in games for some reason). It's been relatively nice all around.
I do wish there was some slightly better platform specific documentation though.
Thank you for illustrating the problem with the Nix community so succintly. When someone brings up those words, I know immediately to distance myself from them.
I suppose that's the American led industrial military complex?
I bloody hate war and the military, but I have to agree with that one. While Russia, China & co. keep moving closer and closer to the fascism of pre-WWII world, the collective West seems to be the only force countering that, though parts of the US politics is showing signs of also falling into the seductive philosophy of fascism.
These people wouldn't know what a fascist was even if Hitler took a dump in their cornflakes.
Meaning of the word has been twisted and manipulated to refer to anyone who has a different opinion on something, to the benefit of actual neonazis and fascists.
I’ve noticed the same things, but I think it’s a symptom of Nix being so polarizing in the first place. I can’t think of another piece of software I dislike so much but I’m willing to put up with it because it’s just that good. Like I can’t wait for someone to come up with a better version. I suspect I’m not alone, and it causes some people to try to abstract away all the warts and sharp edges with these frameworks. Ultimately, it probably comes down to project leadership. There doesn’t seem to be a clear vision, consensus or anybody who can do some wrangling to get things going in a direction.
People have tried with things like guix and there's a few other Nix spinoffs.
The issue is that: Nix/NixOS is here and JUST good enough. So replacing it will be hard. What is come up with has to solve things so much better that the community who has invested in NixOS and others sees enough light that it is worth moving over.
That's gonna be rough. Given how hard nix (the language) is to deal with, I won't call it impossible, but... I will say, the successor is more likely to succeed if NixOS totally implodes, and I might go as far as to say... only if it implodes or offers substantial back compatibility so people can migrate.
As someone who has been vaguely watching the NixOS ecosystem, but never looked closely enough to see what those sharp edges are - is there a writeup somewhere, maybe a blog post or two, that goes over what's so good and bad about Nix?
The most common critiques I personally see are that the syntax and language is unappealing for many folks, and that the docs are pretty frequently some combination of sparse/haphazard/stale.
In my time I very often had to go read raw source to understand how to properly use some less-trivial constructs.
I have enough of an FP background to find the language tolerable but not yet pleasant, or even particularly capable. It's absolutely a fair thing to not enjoy.
The other major criticism that I think is even more defensible and less subjective is that incremental adoption is not very fun. Many things that are well supported on a mainstream Linux distro will not work OOTB in NixOS until some kind soul contributes the Nix-specific implementation of that thing. In some cases that's not even fundamentally possible. So you run into lots of cases where the first hit on a Google search will solve this thing if you're on Debian, but you're looking at hours of triage to do the same thing on NixOS instead.
I have plenty of examples about things that are uniquely possible with NixOS too, but I don't like to evangelize anymore.
It's not exactly a writeup or review, but Ian Henry's blog series How to Learn Nix captures the surprises, good and bad, that a newbie exploring Nix is likely to encounter.
Some of the problems he encounters may be outdated, as Nix and its documentation have both evolved since the start of the series. His experience is also somewhat shaped by his decision to rely solely on the documentation and the software itself for guidance, which he held to for quite a long time-- if you seek help from others earlier on you may get stumped less often. But overall it captures very well what getting to know Nix and its docs is like, including the emotional reactions to sharp edges.
I've been in the ecosystem for years, including working with core maintainers and using it professionally in a large context. I'll just summarize what ultimately turned me away:
1. The community is extremely polarizing. Not just politically, but even from just being a general contributor. Depending on who reviews your PR, you can have a very pleasant experience to a downright demeaning one. I get that every community isn't perfect, but after years of dealing with generally the same problem people, I just quit contributing.
2. The Nix language itself is relatively simple to grasp, but for one reason or another people tend to build it up into a rat's nest that becomes nigh impossible to reverse engineer. Because of it's laziness, the error messages are generally unhelpful, and debugging is nothing but pure pain.
3. The thing that makes Nix great (reproducibility) is also it's greatest pain point. Depending on your language, your packaging experience may be simple to downright infuriating. At one point I just stopped packaging NodeJS/Typescript applications and resorted to other means (and this, of course, tended to anger the fanatics). Bottom line is that most software wasn't built with Nix's constraints in mind which means it's generally always a battle to get things packaged correctly.
4. The kingdom building has continued to be a major problem. Just watch the Nix Discourse for a week and you'll likely see the same problem space reinvented at least a few times. For whatever reason, in the Nix world, it feels like _everyone_ thinks they can do it better. This becomes a serious problem when it comes time to actually producing things in Nix. In my time using it professionally, I had to change "libraries" dozens of times due to lack of maintenance/abandonment. I swear each programming language must have a dozen different libraries for packaging, each with strange bugs and missing implementations.
I am one of the hopeful that something new and better will come out of Nix, but I have high doubts it will come from the community itself.
> The community is extremely polarizing. Not just politically, but even from just being a general contributor. Depending on who reviews your PR, you can have a very pleasant experience to a downright demeaning one. I get that every community isn't perfect, but after years of dealing with generally the same problem people, I just quit contributing.
God, I feel this. I ended up just stop trying to seek help because most of the time I'd come across the MOST self-righteous people I've ever met.
I don't think Nix will ever be easy to use because half the community genuinely does not care about their fellow human beings enough to write software for their fellow human beings.
> I don't think Nix will ever be easy to use because half the community genuinely does not care about their fellow human beings enough to write software for their fellow human beings.
This matches my experience as well. I’ve been trying to use nix either as a system package manager, package manager, or OS since 2019. It was first recommended to me in 2016.
I’ve tried to use it for C++, Python, and Flutter development. I’ve tried to use it on MacOS and NixOS.
There doesn’t seem to be any use case where it’s usable for regular people. I can use it, sometimes, but more often than not it breaks and fixing it becomes the project over the project I was trying to use it for, before I have to give up and abandon it for conventional, less aspirational but actually usable tools.
Just the other day it broke because of a MacOS beta update. The suggested fix in a PR to reinstall it didn’t work. The uninstall instructions didn’t work. In the end, after some manual fidgeting and more ad hoc suggestions on PRs plus some informed guesswork on my part having to do with the ca store at various stages, I was able to restore my install to functioning.
Every time I ran the install it was text-based and filled my screen with intermediate commands and asked me whether it should execute some command that nobody but a POSIX skilled person would understand. Even after trying to tell it not to bother me.
The community has seemed obsessed with flakes that will fragment the ecosystem and lock nixpkgs into backwards compatibility (to some practical degree). Meanwhile when I tried to contribute back to nixpkgs, and an update broke my patch (a derivation that made specifying application derivations roughly as easy as homebrew), no one on the forums could tell me how to fix it.
Now it seems like the community, or some fraction of it, is chasing social perfection while their own tool is in such a half-baked state that I can’t recommend it to anybody, and almost nobody technical that I interact with recognizes it.
Meanwhile, in the time that nix has been…doing whatever it’s been doing, docker has become the de facto standard for reproducible environments. It’s hypothetically not as good, but practically it’s a whole lot easier to use, so now nix has to push back an entrenched competitor if it wants to become more than just this weird niche tool that nobody’s heard of.
I guess if the community doesn’t care if people use their work or not, I can’t blame them if they want to spend their free time on theoretical solutions. But it seems more inability to recognize other people’s hardships and arrogance rather than intentional neglect.
Someday I really hope someone figures this out, because having a cross-platform cross-purpose cross-language declarative package manager would be awesome.
EDIT: Also, one thing that’s bothered me about the recent Nix drama has been how they treat their “own” people. What I’ve heard or seen project leadership or moderation doing has come across as capricious, spiteful, and entitled towards people who have invested huge amounts of time into Nix; regardless of the politics of the individuals involved.
It’s turned me off from continuing to invest in Nix either as a contributor or a user (I was even questioning fixing my preexisting install, but I figured deciding on an alternative and switching right then would take more time). I’m hoping an alternative comes to light, or somehow I’ve misjudged the situation.
I've been having success with Silverblue as an alternative to NixOS (Bluefin, to be specific). Still using home-manager, but the stability has been just as good as LTS NixOS releases.
If you've used a normal linux distro and installed GNOME.. and then decided "That was dumb." and wanted to go back...and realize, you can't. There is no real way to get rid of Gnome sanely. (I can say the same of KDE and other massive packages.)
On Nix, I can, I just remove it from the configuration, and basically reapply my config. No damage done.
For tools I'll want to try out or maybe use 2 times in my life, I can just run them in shells that have them, and not add them.
This all adds up to a much more pleasant experience. I won't say flawless, but... it beats much of what is out there.
I do think people can take it to an extreme which isn't useful. I still have declarative dotfiles, unlike some.
But, for just managing the OS and packages. I've found nothing better. Realize: Things that are clusterfucks to package like python are still clustefucks. But... otherwise... 9/10 would install again, language can take a long walk off a short pier.
> only if it implodes or offers substantial back compatibility so people can migrate.
Yeah, at this point, any successor would have to be compatible with nixpkgs, which means to embed the nix language in some way.
My best migration experience is the vim->neovim one. It (almost) fully supports vimscript and yet runs Lua side-by-side, paving a great way to the full Lua adoption.
I replaced it by never using it, and just using traditional Linux and traditional configuration management.
Or for every use case where that setup sucks, using the containerization ecosystem of my choice instead.
I personally struggle to figure out where the combination of those tools is failing anyone where Nix comes in and saves the day. All I ever hear about it is that it's a great concept and a great thing ruined by excessive difficulty and too many downsides. In that sense I'd rather stick to the devil I know.
> I'm a user of Nix for about seven years and finally decided back in March, during the second rehash of $sponsor controversy, that I'll stop investing and move away from the tech as soon as I have a suitable replacement.
Same for me. We were exploring the use of it across our company for doing the building part of our containers, but the seeping in of identity politics made me rip the whole initiative up, it's simply too risky as you can see very likely paths towards fragmentation and disruption if you use this tech. Such a shame.
I tried using it, but the slow-repos, and weird bugs on my laptop (which needs proprietary blobs) put me off. I very much would prefer using scheme to Nix lang but the eco-system is far smaller.
I really like the idea and architecture of GUIX and I find it like a better design overall than Nix... but unfortunately, being under the GNU, support for proprietary firmware and Operating Systems (i.e. Mac and Windows) makes it really hard for most of us who are using those systems and don't really feel like running a VM just to use whatever software.
I wish they had a separate spinoff that just made sure their software can run on Windows and MacOS, something like exists for emacs, but I think that the challenges are pretty big as they appear to rely on Linux-only APIs?
The challenges are more political than technological. They prefer not to compromise their choice to use only Free Software, which is their right, of course.
However, I've run into a GUIX person or two who frame it as a technical issue because something like macOS lacks a completely verifiable build chain (i.e., needing to use XCode to bootstrap). This is a factual statement, but not the real reason why support for macos/windows is absent.
What is the real reason then? Please enlighten me, because I have been blocked by these technical issues in my past attempts to bring Guix to macOS. Guix is built around glibc and there is no glibc port for macOS. Using XCode for everything is like replacing a bicycle drive train with a steam engine; I guess it's still a vehicle of some sort, but Theseus is still unhappy with his new ship.
Unwillingness to compromise, as you might recall from our last conversation on the topic. This is your right, but framing it as a technical problem is incorrect.
You don't have to use it for everything, that's a straw man. If Guix-darwin was willing to accept some impurity, you could probably use XCode just enough to bootstrap a glibc and compiler chain, and then dispense with it.
Having a completely verifiable toolchain is a laudable political goal, not a technical requirement.
nix-darwin's existence clearly shows there are no technical obstacles to an equivalent guix-darwin.
Believe me, I wanted to like Guix. I'd prefer a Lisp over the nix language, easily. But I'm losing respect for the project based on its messengers.
Humans already have ways to build software on macos, so why bother doing it with something called "Guix" if the thing that we would necessarily --- and for technical reasons --- end up with bears little resemblance to Guix? If someone sees value in that, enough to warrant converting resources to realize this value, they are welcome to do just that.
Note that we also have a way of using Guix as it is on macos via virtualization of Guix System. It also sits atop a large binary blob (the size of the native bits of the qemu closure), just like a macos-native bootstrap of the roots of the Guix graph does.
We're going around in circles now. I believe the Guix equivalent to something like nix-darwin would still be sufficiently guix-like (like a new language impl) to be worthwhile. You believe it wouldn't be guix, and iiuc, nothing short of your vision of guix would be guix, and since that can't be done from top-to-bottom on macOS, guix can't be done. I take it you don't view nix-darwin as nix?
And yet, the nature of identity is always in flux. You are not made up of the same atoms as when you were an infant. Many lines of code in a software project change, and yet it remains the same, ship-of-Theseus style.
Guix's identity could encompass a guix-darwin side project and still remain guix. You think of it as a technical issue, but it's only your choice of what guix means that entails that view. Which comes right back around to my assertion that no macOS support is fundamentally a political choice of guix's devs, not a technical problem.
> end up with bears little resemblance to Guix
Based on my experience with nix-darwin, this seems like exaggeration, and I think most others would agree.
> Note that we also have a way of using Guix as it is on macos via virtualization of Guix System. It also sits atop a large binary blob (the size of the native bits of the qemu closure), just like a macos-native bootstrap of the roots of the Guix graph does.
You are possibly the only person who is using "binary-blob-at-root" as equivalency criteria. Are you genuinely confused why macOS users aren't just using the Qemu Guix? Part of the appeal of nix/guix on mac is not having to pay the virtualization cost.
Guix has the nonguix channel, which provides the vanilla Linux kernel and other packages that contain blobs or nonfree parts: https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix/
I don't know much about the project but as an outsider it all just seems totally insane! People writing letters with screenshots of actions really? Liking a post becomes the equivalent to going on a political march or something? I can't help wonder if a lot of these problems would be avoided by more collaborative in person/talking and frankly more emotional awareness. It's all cognitive left-brain stuff - where is the emotional centre?
Unfortunately still TBD. If I didn't have to support MacOS Guix would be somewhat attractive. I've also come around to enjoying systemd and have an Nvidia GPU in one machine, which are both things Guix doesn't wish to support either.
If Nix disappeared overnight I'd probably be using chezmoi to fill in somewhat for Home Manager and mise to fill in somewhat for devShells, and some ansible to try to fill the gaps, and fairly bitter about it.
I'm philosophically opposed to containers in the dev feedback loop, as I want native installation and performance for my language toolchains and editor and such.
I've been critical of Nix for a variety of reasons along the way but one of those reasons is how so many people (and consultancies) seem hell-bent to set up their own little fiefdoms within the community.
The community is already niche, we certainly didn't need people purposely driving further fragmentation and incompatibility with these frameworks with bad bus factor and NIH designs.
I've seen a lot of tribalism and cargo culting around some of the other efforts in this vein, too.