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.

  • Daniel QuinnEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    My guess would be that it’s because Flatpaks are easy. You have a handy GUI tool often pre installed that includes search and one-click install.

    If you want something lower level, Arch users have the AUR, and others may actually do that horrifying curl https://... | sh pattern.

    Nix pancakes on the other hand… I have no idea how to use them and generally assume it’s the thing NixOS uses. Since I don’t use NixOS, I’ve never given them a second thought.