https://chaos.social/@ktemkin/112392108893774195
This isn’t just a fork of Nix—this is the work of a team of 10+ people near-constantly since early February. (Technically, us too — but our task is really just enabling others.)
Some serious work has gone into ensuring it improves on upstream without having the regressions that have plagued them last three major versions!
And, since this will matter to some — it’s not a project of the NixOS foundation, but an independent organization that takes its responsibility to its community seriously.
Right now, I am struggling because of unemployment and job shortage in the tech-market, but I’m planning to share my own patches to essential software, like you’ve mentioned - probably within the end of this month. I think projects like Node, Ruby and Python need to be maintained well enough.
So if I have a chance to, I’ll probably work on either one of them, especially Node - that seems to be quite dated, and they’ve also skipped on v16, which hurts people who are still on it and don’t want to migrate immediately - because there’s no inferiors to pin to - while there’s multiple commits at least for 10, 14 and 18. Working on it would make Guix convincing as a third-party system package manager. I don’t know the state of Ruby or Python, but Zig seems to be in a decently good condition. Rust may be removed probably to avoid trademark violations, or they’ll probably create a fork and rename it.
About the FOSS extremism, it is not that bad, and I honestly like it the way they’ve maintained it - in a way, it is very similar to how Fedora separates their free and non-free repositories. This is not to say that there’s provisions for no non-free drivers - in fact, I personally use them for my Wi-Fi drivers to work correctly. Given the state of FLOSS-respecting Wi-Fi hardware, Wi-Fi 5 devices still don’t have their respective open-source drivers, so 6, 6E and 7 are still going to be unsupported for a long time with the libre kernel. For folks who want to setup a working system easily, nonguix ISOs are readily available, so that would probably be the best place for anyone to start at.