today I fell down a terrible rabbithole of internet software development community arguments

until today I was aware of a package manager and package description language called Nix, and a competitor called Guix that had a similar design philosophy but diverged in its free software policy and in avoiding the Nix language

my reaction when I learned of Guix was "man, Nix is already pretty small, splitting it further feels like it hurts the survival / success chances of both subdivisions"

anyway as of today I'm aware of:
- Lix, a fork of the Nix package manager seemingly motivated by concerns with the community structure around Nix (e.g. lack of moderation policies, conflicts of interests with for-profits)
- tvix, a complete reimplementation of the Nix package manager, motivated seemingly by technical rather than social issues
- aux, "an alternative to the Nix ecosystem", currently at the planning stage, seemingly founded for similar reasons to Lix but with a much broader scope

it seems like the Nix community is having kind of a bad time, which sucks for knowing where I should focus my efforts. I place my hope in the idea that no-one can really pass up allowing people to use the nixpkgs repository, so contributions there are "stickier". But only time will tell, probably.