I suspect the reason why the full story isn't being told here is because the creators of Lix don't want the project to be seen as purely some "left wing" fork. I don't blame them, especially considering Lix has far more merit than merely "Nix's leadership sucks." Regardless, I'll see if I can give you an overview:

Basically, NixOS's leadership has been seen for a long while as bureaucratic and sloooow even when it comes to core things like UX changes in Nix itself. When it comes to social issues, they have been dragging their heels even more. A lot of discontent has been brewing for years but the most notable conflicts have been when NixOS's leadership accepted funding from Anduril to fund NixCon 2023. Anduril was then dropped as a sponsor, but NixCon North America 2024 again got sponsored by Anduril. Anduril, in case you didn't know, is part of the military industrial complex, and is run by Palmer Luckey, a noted Israel supporter in the ongoing genocide against Palestine.

NixCon getting Anduril sponsorship again ticked off a lot of people. This petition was then opposed by a particularly loud and irritating chunk of the community, including Jon Ringer, a (now former) release manager for NixOS, and most notably, an Anduril employee. Jon maintains that his Anduril employment was irrelevant to his work on Nix, which may very well have been true; up until the point where he started going on rants about Nix becoming "political" in discussions about the sponsorship. He stifled a ton of discussion around this issue, and NixCon went ahead with the Anduril sponsorship. Now that he has been "doxxed" (his employment details were public on LinkedIn, he uses this term to drum up more support for himself dishonestly) he has gone full mask off, and now spends time on the grifter's shithole paradise r/NixOS to complain about how the "woke left" is supposedly trying to infiltrate Nix's leadership and "take over the project" (partly because of the Anduril sponsorship response, partly because of this one RFC where someone dared to advocate for minority representation).

People have been advocating for leadership change to at least try and get NixOS's leadership to do more, but apart from Eelco (the BDFL) stepping down there hasn't been a whole lot that's changed. After reading a lot of these discussions and seeing just how inactive some of this moderating has been (and the fact that when a mod does try to clean up the forums, the grifters cry that the mods are being "political" or whatever the fuck), I'm personally throwing my whole weight behind Lix, because I appreciate project leadership that aims to have a safe community. That, and I also like a project that isn't scared of breaking experimental features.

This is a fork or other form of replacement for nix as in the package manager. It does not replace NixOS, but can be used on NixOS and Darwin.

The problem with Nix and its forks, imho, is that it takes a lot of work, patience, time and the willingness to learn yet another complex workflow with all of its shortcomings, bits and quirks to transition from something tried, tested and stable to something very volatile with no guaranteed widespread adoption.

The whole leadership drama and the resulting forks, which may or may not want to achieve feature parity or spin off into their own thing, certainly doesn't make the investment seem more attractive, either.

I, too, like the concept of Nix very, very much. But apart from some experimental VMs, I'm not touching it on anything resembling a production environment until it looks to like it's here to stay (predictable).

This is a fork of the evaluator/language implementation/daemon/builder/whatever you want to call it. The other one (Auxolotl) is a fork of Nixpkgs, the repository of build scripts and all the NixOS misc pieces.

Or put into other terms, this is a fork of APT/RPM as well as their associated builder tools, while Aux is a fork of Debian/Fedora/whatever. The Nix evaluator is a much more complex piece of software than most other package managers so it does benefit from having a dedicated team working on it.

Are your dotfiles public? I'd be interested in taking a look.

It's basically focused on establishing good community-centered governance, cleaning up the codebase, standardizing workflows (reconciling disparate parts of nix), and (I think?) eventually reimplementing the whole thing in Rust instead of C++.

How confusing will looking up "elixir mix Linux" be in web searches though 👀

No man is an island, but they can fork one!