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.

  • Shareni
    1·
    9 months ago

    But you don’t get hardware graphics acceleration unless you use nixgl, and if you want to integrate it into home manager that breaks XDG entries, which I never figured out.

    Thanks, I didn’t know that.

    Also, you are illustrating the point of the commenter you replied to

    Oh yeah, this is a part of my reply to the OP:

    The documentation is abysmal. I spent days trying to figure out how to use nix as a declarative package manager before I accidentally came across home-manager. Even the manual leads you down the wrong path. A quick start guide with a few examples for home-manager and flakes, and a few basic commands, would’ve had me going in 5 minutes. That problem is made worse by the fact that almost all sources of info focus on nixos instead.