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.

  • Matej@matejc.comEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Dont know where you are getting this. Nixpkgs is a breeze to manage compared to apt repo. Also it does not matter if you are on nixos or non-nixos system, the only difference is that nix does not take care of services on its own. What kind of docs do you miss? Nix has its own extensive nix docs page, and for packaging you also have nixpkgs documentation page - also official and not much related to nixos itself. Also nix has quite good man pages.

    • neo (he/him)@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      I’m not saying it’s not easy, I’m saying there’s not really any documentation about it.

      I had to figure out for myself that I needed to do symlinks to get menu entries for nix packages

      • Shareni@programming.dev
        0·
        9 months ago

        I had to figure out for myself that I needed to do symlinks to get menu entries for nix packages

        Home-manager: I didn’t have to touch anything to get PATH and XDG working, it’s all automated.

        • moonpiedumplings@programming.dev
          0·
          9 months ago

          But you don’t get hardware graphics acceleration unless you use nixgl, and if you want to integrate it into home manager that breaks XDG entries, which I never figured out.

          Also, you are illustrating the point of the commenter you replied to: nowhere on the official docs does it recommend home manager for non nixos systems, at least not when i was scrolling through them. I learned about home manager, nixgl, and the like via forum posts, either by finding them via a web search, or by asking myself.

          For example, I only found code to integrate home manager with nixgl on the nixos discourse.