Distro agnostic packages like flatpaks and appimages have become extremely popular over the past few years, yet they seem to get a lot of dirt thrown on them because they are super bloated (since they bring all their dependencies with them).
NixPkgs are also distro agnostic, but they are about as light as regular system packages (.deb/.rpm/.PKG) all the while having an impressive 80 000 packages in their repos.
I don’t get why more people aren’t using them, sure they do need some tweaking but so do flatpaks, my main theory is that there are no graphical installer for them and the CLI installer is lacking (no progress bar, no ETA, strange syntax) I’m also scared that there is a downside to them I dont know about.
Part of the reason is that people are still finding out about it, Project has no marketing so it grows organically, in the last year the number of contributors grew by 25 percent.
Another problem is that it still needs polish in term of ease of use, for example it takes me forever to search for packages using the nix-env command but using the website it takes less then a second, That’s a basic feature that still does not work correct, Plus their documentation is still not great in my opinion, I actually helped improved it and the improvement they made is still not really good IMO.
It’s cause you’re not actually supposed to use nix-env: https://stop-using-nix-env.privatevoid.net/
You’re actually supposed to be using
nix search nixpkgs#packagenameto search andnix profile install nixpkgs#packagenameto install.However, to use both of those, you need to have the “experimental” (not really though, most of the community uses them) features of nix-command and nix flakes enabled, which they aren’t by default.
And of course, nowhere on the main documentation did I find any if that, I only found it via the pain of using it wrong, and forum posts.
Nix’s documentation is horrific. I’ve had situations where I only got help via discord…
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Of the future? They’re a duplicate of what Apple was doing with software as far back as the mid 90s.
Every ounce of performance we squeeze out of our hardware is replaced with pounds of bloat like this.
It’s fine for a utility or something you’ll hardly ever need to use, but running every day software like this is a complete waste.
What do you mean? Apple doesn’t have a package manager at all. Brew is a fucking mess that takes ages to do anything.
There’s no bloat, nix are system packages
If there’s no bloat why is there a garbage collector?
Rollback, reproducibility, safety.
Would you call btrfs snapshots or some other backup system bloat?
It actually serves an important purpose for the user. Meanwhile apt is leaving around random libraries and man pages you need to autoremove.
The garbage collector removes all packages/derivations that are not (transitively) used any more. So it is similar to apt-get autoremove. I don’t think that classifies as bloat. You could just regularly run the garbage collector.
Because nixPKGs have the same Single-Source of Truth wrecking problems as flatpaks and appimages and all that junk.
There’s only so much room in the ecosystem for best-practice-violating product, and systemd takes up a lot of that. And until systemd collapses under the weight of doing a thousand things poorly for all the wrong reasons and delivering on none of its brochure features, the other entrants have to wait outside.
As a largely non-technical linux enjoyer I have such a hard time understanding why people hate systemd so much. If I switched to a distro that uses another init system would my experience be better?
Like I get that the complaint is partially the philosophy, but it sounds like you also have problems with it in practice and I just can’t really relate to that. I dunno, maybe I just wouldn’t notice if there are problems happening with how my init system is working 🤷
