this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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Why aren't more people using NixPKGs? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by clemdemort@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nix packages are a pain to manage on non-nix systems and basically all documentation exists for nixos, not nixpkgs.

[–] matejc@matejc.com 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.comfysnug.space 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Shareni@programming.dev 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

Could you please share some examples? I tried searching the forum for it, but no luck.

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Did some searching, also can't find the original forum post lol.

https://github.com/nix-community/nixGL/issues/114#issuecomment-1585323281

and this: https://pmiddend.github.io/posts/nixgl-on-ubuntu/

The latter looks like what I originally used, but what I originally used broke the generated application menu entries.

[–] Shareni@programming.dev 1 points 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.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

Also, you are illustrating the point of the commenter you replied to

Oh yeah, this is a part of my reply to the OP:

The documentation is abysmal. I spent days trying to figure out how to use nix as a declarative package manager before I accidentally came across home-manager. Even the manual leads you down the wrong path. A quick start guide with a few examples for home-manager and flakes, and a few basic commands, would've had me going in 5 minutes. That problem is made worse by the fact that almost all sources of info focus on nixos instead.

[–] neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And where in the documentation is that?

[–] Shareni@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Nix docs are hot garbage, but I'm pretty sure it tells you to reboot when you finish installing either nix or home-manager. It didn't appear to me in a dream.

[–] neo@lemmy.comfysnug.space 1 points 9 months ago

to clarify, i was talking about home-manager