Present what NixOS can practically do

[davidak]

We could have a section on the landing page with examples what people achieve with NixOS. This is an opportunity to show that this is a community project with lot of innovative and cool possibilities, but also used seriously as a stable foundation for companies.

So it's related to https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/issues/284.

For example:

• LumiGuide develops and maintains bicycle and car parking guidance systems that are deployed in various cities in the Netherlands and abroad.
• Tumblr is also well-known. this is strong: "Infrastructure automation testing is hard, but NixOS makes it a breeze. Using NixOS' testing framework, Tumblr developed a comprehensive integration test suite for Jetpants, Tumblr's database automation toolkit designed to manage billions of rows and hundreds of database machines."
• Usage in Academia: "Nix is also being extensively used to manage powerful computing clusters, since its resolution of dependency problems allows letting users install packages ad-hoc with greatly reduced risk of breaking things. Academic clusters utilizing Nix-based software include some of the biggest clusters in the world"
• i hear often that Haskell developers like NixOS. what are practical examples where NixOS really helps? when we present this on the landing page, more Haskell developers will come
• i think it's also popular among previous Arch linux users that modify their system heavily (aka ricing, window manager, custom theme, anime background :smile:). investigate why nixos appeal to arch users and why people prefer it. then get a statement from someone stating that

we can have an image and a short text. 2-3 sentences. maybe link to longer story. maybe we have so many cool things to show that is has to be a carousel , but we should try to keep the landing page clean

Related:

• https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix_Community
• https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/5dz8fp/list_of_companies_using_nixos/
• https://discourse.nixos.org/t/list-of-companies-using-nixos-technologies/8428

Nix Ecosystem users and contributors are a mixed bunch, ranging from hobbyist to professional, from industry to academia. Typical user groups include:

• desktop users using Nix and NixOS to make life on their personal machines easier;
• power users duplicating their environment across their personal and work machines;
• developers using Nix to reproducibly build their software, and to manage various development environments;
• system administrators declaratively configuring servers and clusters with NixOS and NixOps;
• researchers interested in making the computation in their research reproducible.

let's show examples from all groups and present this to the visitors

this would be better than just show logos of popular companies as "used by industry leaders"

[garbas]

I removed the reference to Mozilla since it is not using it anymore.

[davidak]

@garbas can you clarify this more? nixpkgs-mozilla has the last commit in february and there are still new issues and pull requests. if it is no longer maintained, that should be mentioned in the readme and the project archived! We link to that in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/doc/languages-frameworks/rust.section.md#using-the-rust-nightlies-overlay.

[davidak]

I don't believe that Mozilla is not using Nix anymore. The last commit was 22 days ago and the latest pull request 7 days ago.

@nbp @rail can you tell me how Mozilla uses Nix and NixOS? We might publish that on the website.

[rail]

I'm not aware of anything other than personal usage, we have a few people actively using NixOS as their main OS. We used to use Nix to deploy various services, but not anymore. :/

[jonringer]

@rail I'm curious as why nix was discontinued :)

[rail]

Mostly because we had not enough expertise in our team. 1.5 person in a 15-person team wasn't sustainable.

[jonringer]

that sounds reasonable, was just curious. Thanks! :)