I’ve been watching this for a while now.

Most interesting is:

https://github.com/snowfallorg/nix-software-center , a GUI software center for nix

And https://github.com/snowfallorg/nixos-conf-editor , a GUI config editor for nix

Just like Eelco’s way of governing, it will likely have 0 effect on 99% of people using NixOS,

Flakes not being stabilized, or worked on by Eelco, despite him literally being the inventor absolutely has an effect on every single Nix user. The flakes-nonflakes aplit is part of why the documentation on nix is so poor. Some things only support one or the other, and it’s a pain.

The aux fork of nix (which idk what’s gonna happen to it) said they would stabilize the current implementation of flakes as v0. I hope this new council does the same, because it’s been far too long. So much of the community uses flakes that’s it’s basically official, but it being “experimental” means they can’t be mentioned in official docs, or included by default in the official installer. You have to edit a config file to enable flakes.

The worst part of this all, is that the Determinate Systems nix installer, only comes with flakes and no channels (old way) - and Eelco literally works for Determinate Systems. Despite all of this, flakes are still “experimental”.

I hope things change. Flakes are legitimately better, a minor addition in complexity, in exchange for making it easy to reuse code. And finally having unified documentation and tooling (if flakes become the main way) will probably be the best benefit.

I really hope this council moves flakes put of their “experimental” status. If so, then democracy has spoken: the users want flakes.

Related: https://getindie.wiki/

The person telling you to “learn what AD is” is kinda a douche, but they aren’t wrong.

AD is mainly 3 components in one:

• Configuration management across a variety of machines
• Shared logins
• Shared user data across many machines

All of these are doable on Linux. In many ways. Many, many ways. That you have to set up yourself.

For configuration management, do you want ansible, puppet, chef, nix, etc?

For shared logins, do you want openldap, lldap, Red Hat’s ldap, etc?

For shared user data, do you want nfs, systemd-homed, or something else?

And for all of those, you have to evaluate, maybe test, and then select a solution, and then set it up yourself in a resilient manner.

Nixos, as a server distro, can host the relevant services needed for this. As a desktop distro, it can also do configuration management. But that’s missing the point of AD, in my opinion.

The point of AD, and how it managed to become so popular, is that it is all of those, in an all-in-one solution that is simple to use (joining Windows machines to a domain is trivial), and it also comes with paid support.

Even if you were to build your own alternative on Nixos, which would be a lot of tinkering and twiddling, then you would end up with some of the same core features, but you would have to maintain, secure, etc, it yourself, and not having to do those to such an extent is why people buy Active Directory. There would be no alternative to things like Group Policy, instead you would be writing your own nix code.

So yeah. Unless someone comes along and builds an all-in-one solution on top of Nixos, nixos isn’t really an alternative to active directory. You can replicate the core features. But it’s not an alternative.