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@programming.dev
    3·
    4 months ago

    Like literally what’s the point of having a shell with ffmpeg? Why not simply install it? Even if you need something just once, just install it and then uninstall it, takes like 10 seconds.

    The last time I used it, I needed arandr just to create a layout with a new monitor. Why would I install it, use it, remove it, and then auto remove the leftovers when I can just run a single line to use it once and forget about it? My old installs were littered with random crap like that that I’ve used once and forgot to remove.

    The other use case that is often brought up is for managing dev environments, but for a lot of popular languages (Python, Node, Java, Rust, etc. ) there are proven environment management options already (pyenv and poetry, nvm, jenv, rustup).

    Here’s the last time I used it: I needed to compile some rust binary but I don’t have rust or cargo installed. Since the repo has a nix flake, I was able to clone it, cd into the directory, run “nix develop”, and start compiling. Much easier than having to find and install all of the compile time dependencies, and then remove them a minute later.

    Besides that, there’s a reason why python has different 20 venv packages: they’re all crap. Nix is a better alternative and leaves you with a single dependency for every OS.

    Not to mention Docker. In the corporate setting I haven’t seen nix replacing any of these.

    Declarative package management definitely has it’s benefits, and nix has been growing in that space ever since they’ve added the option to generate docker images from nixos configs. It’s not meant to replace docker, just to give you an option to create finely tuned base images.

    GUI app shortcuts work in neither of the OSs

    Home-manager on Debian: no manual set up was required.

    error messages are about as readable as the ones you get for C++ templates

    They can get overly long, but perfectly raadable if you start from the bottom.

    All in all nix seems like a pretty concept but not too practical at the moment.

    Nixos sure, but with nix I get the same bleeding edge userland packages on Debian and whatever else I’m running at the time. It’s just a list of packages, but it makes life so much easier.