A community-controlled fork of the Nix package manager, born from the crisis of spring 2024 when maintainers publicly resigned from the Nix project over corporate sponsorship and governance. It is now the default Nix for a growing minority and ships releases Nix itself later merges.
A fork of the Nix language and package manager with performance and quality-of-life work: faster evaluation, better error messages, and aggressive parallel garbage collection. Kept the LGPL-2.1-or-later license of the original, an explicit rejection of the AGPL discussions that surrounded the Nix crisis.
Nix, created by Eelco Dolstra in 2003, is the foundation of the NixOS distribution and the nixpkgs package collection, and one of the most influential package managers ever written. By 2024 its governance had become a running sore: a small group of maintainers ran the project, and a large-scale sponsorship from defense contractor Anduril gave corporate influence a seat at the table. The crisis peaked in the spring of 2024, when twenty-four maintainers resigned and the rest publicly asked Dolstra to step down from the board.
Lix was forked from Nix 2.18 in February 2024 and announced in May 2024 after the public letter 'Save Nix Together' drew more than a hundred signatures. Its charter is explicit: the project is community-owned, run by a foundation (AFNix, legally incorporated in France), and funded by donations rather than corporate sponsorship. Its slogan - 'built for a community, not for a corporation' - is both mission statement and insult. The fork has since shipped a steady stream of releases, and in 2025 the Nix project itself merged features first developed in Lix, notably parallel garbage collection.
The Lix repository is created, forked from Nix 2.18.
'Save Nix Together' open letter is published; 24 maintainers resign.
Lix is publicly announced on the Nix Discourse as a community fork.
First release, 2.90 'Vanilla Ice Cream'.
Release 2.94 'Açaí na tigela' is the first to include parallel garbage collection.
Release 2.95 'Kakigōri' lands; Lix is in active production use.
“He was asked to step down as part of the governance reforms.”
“Built for a community, not for a corporation.”
Lix turned a governance dispute into a durable competitor. Nix remains the default for most users, but Lix is the reason the original project changed its governance in 2024 and it has pushed the entire ecosystem toward faster releases. In 2025 the Nix project adopted Lix-originated features, the closest thing a fork gets to a seal of approval.