this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Seeing this prompted me to do an experiment.
There was a time when Nixpkgs was smaller than the AUR. And, until recently, Nixpkgs was larger than the AUR but still smaller than the combination of the main Arch repos with the AUR.
As it turns out, the current total package count for Arch and the AUR is 85,819.
For nixpkgs unstable, that number is 88,768.
NixOS 23.05 Stable has 83,740.
And considering the mention of 9,147 new packages and 4,015 removed packages, that would mean that 23.11 would have a total of:
88,872 packages. This is more than the current figures for Nixpkgs unstable, but this is going off data from separate sources (NixOS devs and repology, with repology still being slightly outdated)
And, as such, I think it's fair to say the winner is (drumroll please)....
The USER for having such incredible distributions, giving him the vast breadth of choice for what distro matches their workflow best.
Though the difference is AUR packages aren't officially supported or tested and are commonly out of date. They also need to be built on your system
To be fair, the level of support for packages in nixpkgs is inconsistent. My config has a number of backported packages overlaid on top of nixpkgs where upstream is not up to date enough for me.