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.

  • @[email protected]
    8•9 months ago

    Flakes confuse me.
    Guides online say “oh yeah just do this, it’s easy” and don’t mention flakes at all.
    So I try the thing and it says ARE YOU FUCKING SURE, YOU IDIOT, YOU ABSOLUTE MORON, YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING WITHOUT ENABLING FLAKES AND YOU HAVEN’T DONE THAT SO YOU CLEARLY DON’T DESERVE NICE THINGS but like, is there just no non-flakes version of that thing, what’s the point of having an option that’s not enabled by default if you can’t do anything without it on

    @[email protected] shares my pain and also explained what I was doing wrong:
    https://programming.dev/comment/7537131

    • @[email protected]
      5•9 months ago

      Flakes is still experimental. NixOS devs takes a bunch of time to release that. So most experienced users have enabled Flakes since years. Two different systems are available, which does not help ease of learning.