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.

  • kadu@lemmy.world
    0·
    8 months ago

    because they are super bloated (since they bring all their dependencies with them).

    I love they work like that and much prefer this approach. We aren’t in the 80’s using 10 MB storage devices. Please, for the love of God, bundle all your dependencies with your application and the exact version you need, isolate them from other programs. macOS and Windows apps have been doing this for ages.

    • clemdemort@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      8 months ago

      Well the issue for me is internet speed, yesterday night I had to leave my pc on for two hours to update my flatpaks, I don’t even have that many of them, but the updates were mostly drivers and runtimes.

    • MilkLover@lemmy.ml
      0·
      8 months ago

      Nix is a bit of a middle ground. Each package has a specific set of dependency version. It calculates the hash of each dependency and compares it to those that you have installed. If it is installed, it uses that, if it isn’t, it installs it. This means that packages can have different versions and dependency hell is impossible, whilst also reusing existing dependencies if they’re the exact same.