Comment by koito17

As far as I can understand, the complaint is about the behavior of the owner of the Nix project, together with alleged ties to military companies. Most of the sources are assorted screenshots of Matrix and X posts with snide remarks, so it's hard for me to understand the latter claim. As for Eelco's behavior, it seems like a case of BDFL gone wrong. Tightly restricting the commit bit but also not taking the time to review patches is certainly annoying. The Clojure community a few years ago had a similar friction and ensuing drama (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123)

The installer issues are annoying. I just barely started using Nix, and I'm completely new to it. I wasted an entire day tinkering with the default Nix install to enable flakes and other features that are apparently experimental, even though they are widely used by the community. In the end, I did use the Determinate Systems installer simply because, on Mac OS at least, it provides Flakes out of the box, functioning package search, and the Zero-to-Nix guide assumes you are using their installer. It's hard for me to judge why exactly this is a bad thing. The site seems to just list it as an aside for the ineptitude (intentional or not) of the Nix maintainers.