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.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
    1•9 months ago

    Sure. My point is that it’s trivial to make and test packages for many distributions; it is harder to do so for Nix. It tends to get your software out there and used faster if you bootstrap the packaging - immediately, if you have an AUR account.

    IMHO, Nix is unreasonably harder. There are frequently small projects that don’t get packaged for most distros. When I encounter these, I have a couple of options:

    • Submit a packaging request. Hope someone is willing to accept it. Wait until it is packaged.
    • Install it from source and let it pollute the core system. Hope this causes no issues. Manually track and maintain the installation. If lucky, the software lets itself be installed somewhere non-standard, in which case I can use stow and keep things a bit cleaner.
    • Throw together a package for it and let my distro manage the installation.

    The third option is preferrable to the others, for a variety of reasons, and it’s easy on most distros. On Arch, I might submit the package to AUR, but I’ll often just make a -git package and install it locally.

    • Atemu
      1•9 months ago

      It tends to get your software out there and used faster if you bootstrap the packaging

      It’s fine to provide some sort of “official” binary package in some common format such as a Flatpak, Appimage or even just a plain old tarball but trying to package something for many different distros is insanity IMHO.

      My point is that it’s trivial to make and test packages for many distributions; it is harder to do so for Nix.

      it’s easy on most distros

      It all depends on what you’re used to and how cursed the project’s build process is.
      For sane build systems, I find it much easier to package for Nix now that I know its intricacies. I wouldn’t want to go back to weirdly sourced bash scripts without proper structured data types or any sort of abstractions or mechanism for extremely common patterns.

      On Arch, I might submit the package to AUR, but I’ll often just make a -git package and install it locally.

      It’s the same for NixOS. When I encounter something that somehow isn’t packaged in Nixpkgs yet, I usually start out by simply packaging it in my local nixpkgs checkout.
      There are handy tools to generate the little boilerplate there is and, if the package uses a reasonably standard build system, it usually only takes adding the dependencies and one or two tweaks to have a working package that is then also ready for submission to upstream Nixpkgs.