So uh, “nix” wasn’t exactly search engine friendly. I think it’d be real great if that traditon wasn’t carried over since its unfixable after any level of work has been established.
Ex: “react” => useless google results
“react js” => exactly what people are looking for.
Obviously the sooner the change the better, if it can be pivoted within 24hrs
(From @ onlinepersona Lemmy)
Same. Short it nice, but it has to be unique and memorable too. Aux is an already existing word.
Things that don’t exist yet
Suprisingly already exist
Probably some LLM could come up with something too given a good prompt.
What about silyx? I think it sounds cool and we could have an in-joke with being “sillly”. Also, it onlly competes with a hair extension company, so I don’t think that it’d conflict with anything. Pronounced sill-ix.
I think I’d like to keep Aux. The name is short, is close to nix, isn’t a common program, and has meaning (auxiliary).
The issue of discoverability should be able to be resolved with specificity:
And so on. I don’t believe any of these are currently in use and allow us to have a consistent lineup of projects that are easily identifiable.
Just one note: the new name shouldn’t have “Nix” anywhere in it for trademark reasons. Ones like Nuxor or Lixin or Apaux would work
Have you seen Profile - zimbatm - NixOS Discourse 's hair? I keep complaining about it. It’s the main reason I’d consider jumping ship from nix to aux.
Although Aux doesn’t have excellent searchability right now, I do think that it’s the kind of name that can be very memorable and recognizable once established.
As far as aesthetic and effective branding goes, I’m more concerned with the .computer TLD personally. Understandably there probably aren’t many aux domains available as it’s a 3 character word, but I think grabbing a .org with “auxos” like nixos.org or even something like “auxgroup” would be better. It’s mostly a personal nitpick though.
Did you check those though? Like the OS thats already called A/UX?
I think this won’t work well and we will reget it later. Sometimes I just want to search something about the nix language but the stack overflow post didnt include “nix lang” it just said “nix” and then google just never finds it. And I don’t mean nix cli or nix package or nix os, I mean nix lang but it just doesn’t show up.
Its the whole reason I have to search the discourse instead of google, because google doesnt find much.
I’ve resorted to just always calling it “nixpkgs” even when I mean nix lang or nix os because “nix os” conflates with Unix OS. And same with Aux and A/UX even though its dead.
One extra x could completely and permanently solve this problem.
It just feels like “Aux” is motivated by intangible preference, while Auxx (or other) is motivated by a very real and tangible problem that nix still suffers from.
(Last post for me for tonight)
Also, taking a step back and looking at this thread from a meta perspective; this could be a good starting point for establishing how the Aux discourse can handle disagreement in a healthy way.
This issue is a bit unique because it is fundamental to the project and our governance structures do not fully exist yet. Reasonably, a project name change isn’t something that would happen. However, a new project’s name may be decided in the future. I believe for that some community input may be useful, but the steering committee should be the place where that decision is made. As well, we really don’t need to spend a bunch of time on names for the most part. Aux isn’t exactly assessable in today’s world because none of our projects exist yet and no documentation or community resources exist to be linked to. Much the same way that searching “rust atomics” would yield different results before and after the programming language rust came into being.
I have first hand experience with trying to find a good alternative name for the oils project (previously oilshell) - which has been extremely badly named (type ‘shell oil’ into google…).
@jakehamilton I highly recommend you to really reconsider this. It’s not as bad as oilshell but atill somewhat ambiguous. NOW is the only time when it’s rather easy to change. I know, you got the dns and everything set up. But there would be much more to change once it takes off. The “annoyance” of a name change is fine NOW. Only a few months down the road it would annoy much more people.
Anyway I’m very thankful you took all your time to set things up. I’d understand if you were to keep aux. I can imagine you already spent a lot of time on this!
In the end it’s ‘just a name’ - which is currently a tiny bit better to google than nix. And nix “worked out” 
Any way I would suggest the “auxolotl” as mascot. 
I appreciate the input here, thank you. I’ll definitely be doing more thinking on this.
Also… AUXOLOTL?! HOW DID I NOT SEE THAT?!! Brilliant!
Amazing! I agree with using the auxolotl as a mascot; it could also serve as a logo.
ooooh, new logo idea? I take back everything with the name change I said earlier.
I agree!
For a shortening, auxo doesn’t seem to be a major search term. The mascot could be Auxo The Auxolotl.
I quite like the name shorting here axl over auxo.
I like axl too. It gives slightly more clutter in searches than auxo but not much.
I was thinking about rust and it’s googleability, which you can always workaround by searching for “rust-lang” instead of rust.
Maybe we can rename the project to “Auxsys” (The Aux System) which would serve as a umbrella for AuxOS, etx. Auxsys is easier to search I think
Huh. Apparently A.X.L. is a military robotic dog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.X.L.
We could get sponsored by Anduril!