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US sanctions force The Netherlands off Microsoft and toward alternative NixOS

388 points · 396 comments · mywacaday

  1. paulvnickerson · · focus · HN ↗
    They didn't have to go with NixOS...
    1. whazor · · focus · HN ↗
      They previously used openSUSE and then Fedora. But both have companies behind them, where-as NixOS does not. And with NixOS they are more sovereign.
      1. andsoitis · · focus · HN ↗
        > They previously used openSUSE and then Fedora.

        Why did those not work out? Why do they think things will be different with NixOS?

        1. geek_at · · focus · HN ↗
          Because it was suse and fedora
        2. Ilaurens · · focus · HN ↗
          Fedora is connected to Red Hat which is a US company, which is exactly the dependence that is undesired
      2. orbital-decay · · focus · HN ↗
        NixOS (or rather nixpkgs) in its current state heavily depends on GitHub/Microsoft at the very least, and switching to anything else is non-trivial.
        1. whizzter · · focus · HN ↗
          Perhaps why they're forking it?
        2. whazor · · focus · HN ↗
          Nixpkgs is quite explicit about how to produce the distribution. You can rebuild the entire distro from source and backup the source code for every package.

          As a normal NixOS user, I know how to do this. It would be quite some effort, but not especially difficult. Additionally, for a government they have the servers to set up a build farm.

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