Nix Community
This article provides an overview of the Nix Community, to give an idea of who we — the users and maintainers of the Nix Ecosystem — are. To find the various ways to reach us, see get in touch.
People
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;
- gamers using NixOS to declaratively configure unbreakable and sharable gaming setups;
- 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.
Institutions
NixOS Foundation
The NixOS Foundation is responsible for providing operational and organizational support to the Nix Ecosystem and community. It also funds the official Hydra instance which builds the Nixpkgs collection.
The ecosystem is developed and maintained by many individuals and self-organised community teams.
Consultants
There are a several qualified consultants that can provide support for Nix-based systems:
Industry
Many companies utilize Nix-based systems for various purposes. Prominent examples include:
- Mozilla (see also nixpkgs-mozilla)
- Tumblr
- LogicBlox
- LumiGuide
- RhodeCode
- Awake Security
- Atlassian
- Replit
- Magnetic Insight, a medical imaging company.
Academia
Nix has its roots in academia; Nix was the result of Eelco Dolstra's PhD thesis in the University of Utrecht, and Hydra was developed at the Technical University of Delft. Some academic research continues to develop the Nix Ecosystem further - notably some work is planned on incremental builds by Guillaume Maudoux as part of his PhD.
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: