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.
Yeah, if it wasn’t for my niche needs and desires of using my SteamDeck without touching the system partition, I probably wouldn’t have messed with Nix because of how much of a confusing mess of modes and switches there are, and I’ve used terminal based package managers for years. It’s very far from the simple “it just works” of Flatpaks.
https://linuxgamingcentral.com/posts/steamos-getting-nix-support/
Dunno if this ever came to fruition though.
They added the Nix directory in SteamOS 3.5 and linked it to the User partition, so now Nix survives SteamOS updates without any workarounds, which is part of why I tried using it.
Imagine this: a quickstart script to install nix and home-manager, and generate an example home.nix and it’s flake. If those files included a few comments on basic usage and what commands to run in order to install and update everything, I legit wouldn’t have had to google anything.
Literally: here’s a list, this is how you add packages to it, this is how you ensure everything on it is installed to the newest possible version, enjoy!
It’s not click flatpak in a GUI level of simplicity, but it would’ve saved me days of frustration.