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.

  • @clemdemortOPEnglish
    3•9 months ago

    From what I gather it goes something like this:

    • every package is assigned a hash
    • every package lists their dependencies through their hashes
    • different versions of packages have different hashes
    • when you launch an application it creates an environment with all its dependencies, this means that two applications that both use the same library at the same version share that library. However if they both require the same lib but not the same version of that lib they don’t share it.

    Which solves DLL hell as far as i understand it.