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.

  • Avid Amoeba
    51·
    10 months ago

    Windows apps have been doing this for ages with disasterous security results due to the lack of mandatory OS sandboxing. E.g. CVE for admin level RCE via Adobe Flash. This model works with third party apps only when sandboxed. This was done from the get go on Android and now with Snap and Flatpak (I assume). It’s absolutely the way to go once the security framework is in place.