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.

  • @moonpiedumplings
    10•4 months ago

    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#packagename to search and nix profile install nixpkgs#packagename to 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…