Hey, author here, not sure how popular this article is gonna be with HN, but want it to get out there.
This mostly just establishes some words that I'm using when discussing NixOS and the wider ecosystem.
Formalizing them hopefully will make it easier for others to reason and argue about functional system distributions without getting confused and talking past each other.
And with the new trademark, having ways to say "a thing like nix" that don't get you in trouble with the trademark seemed useful.
I hope this also make people think about how they can make things like Nix(OS), not just fork them, and that this is a general paradigm and not just something NixOS and GuixSD gets to do.
cafkafk•1h ago
This mostly just establishes some words that I'm using when discussing NixOS and the wider ecosystem.
Formalizing them hopefully will make it easier for others to reason and argue about functional system distributions without getting confused and talking past each other.
And with the new trademark, having ways to say "a thing like nix" that don't get you in trouble with the trademark seemed useful.
I hope this also make people think about how they can make things like Nix(OS), not just fork them, and that this is a general paradigm and not just something NixOS and GuixSD gets to do.