Today, I wanted to have another go with nix. Previously I just read about it and didn’t do anything for a couple of months. Now, I installed nix package manager with very few lines of code and two more to install many packages as described in his post. Installation was very fast on my banana laptop. Until now I used distrobox but I always wondered which distro/ package manager to use. What’s your experience with it? For now, I’ll test it. It’s super easy to use. It may not be straight forward to a linux newcomer but if you know what you want, e.g. ffmpeg you can just add it with home-manager edit and install it with home-manager switch. So far, I love it!

  • trevorEnglish
    9•6 months ago

    Nix has more packages , by far. Nix also automatically handles the dependent libraries for each package, which is something you can’t do with brew on immutable systems. This means that Nix can install software like espanso, which wouldn’t work on uBlue derivatives otherwise.

    I really wish the uBlue maintainers would have opted for Nix over brew for that reason. It’s not much more difficult to do nix profile install nixpkgs#package-name over brew install package-name. They could have even aliased it to make it easier.