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.
As you can see from the state of this thread, people see nix or nixpkgs but read nixos. There’s no momentum from the community to push it as an extra package manager, while every thread is spammed with nixos.
No gui integrations for casuals. For example Discover integrates flatpaks and snaps, but for nix you need to use the terminal.
The documentation is abysmal. I spent days trying to figure out how to use nix as a declarative package manager before I accidentally came across home-manager. Even the manual leads you down the wrong path. A quick start guide with a few examples for home-manager and flakes, and a few basic commands, would’ve had me going in 5 minutes. That problem is made worse by the fact that almost all sources of info focus on nixos instead.
Edit:
if anyone’s interested in trying it out, here’s a part of my other comment in this thread
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.
The more ive learned to code and the better I’ve become at solving my own problems on Linux, the more I’ve been absolutely fucking bewildered about how so many people can spend so much time and effort into projects they care deeply about and fail to include even the most basic of necessary instructions. Like “this one simple step is crucial and you can’t do fuck all else if you don’t do it”, kind of necessary
I think they want people to use the things they built, right? And yet, here’you are in a Kafkaesque nightmare with no visible exit, seemingly alone as if you’re the only person to ever actually need the crucial but of instructions necessary to make this thing work.
You wonder: am I just an idiot? Iss everything else in on something that I just don’t get? So you spend hours pissing into the wind as Google tantalizingly dangles tangential words at you, having become the internet equivalent of a bully snatching away the toy you brought for show and tell while swearing THIS is the last time, and you soldier onwards for hours, determined that you’re going to get this fucking thing working even though you know that for the sake of your sanity and our limited time on earth the better choice would be to give up. You make a point to leave a comment about your struggle on GitHub, just in case someone else finds themselves in your position one day, feeling less like an accomplished problem solver and more like someone who’s had to pop their own dislocated shoulder into place after dropping a piping hot pizza and falling on black I d. You’ve learned something, you’re more self reliant, this will be less serious in the futurre, but you can’t shake this weird feeling growing ever more insistent, a question you just can’t seem to answer: why? You’ll never know, and though it bothers you, you set to work trying to get this new image generation model to make you some anime women with comically oversized tits and worryingly unnaturally thin waists.
I’m glad it’s not just me.