this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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How does it stack up against traditional package management and others like AUR and Nix?

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[–] Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for your great explanation!
How up-to-date are the packages, compared to Flatpaks?

IIRC, I used Nix a while ago to install a program, which was supposedly hard to build for Linux and crashed all the time as Flatpak. Sadly, the Nix version was almost a year old and also not great.

But I think I'll take a look into it again. I began using terminal apps a lot more and also became a huge fan of image based distros, and I think Nix packages have similar benefits as immutable distros.

[–] Shareni@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago

How up-to-date are the packages, compared to Flatpaks?

Same or more up to date. It's up there with arch, but some packages are purposely separated. For example the go package is 1.21.7, but there's also a go_1_22 package that's 1.22.1. I'm guessing they're waiting for it to be fully tested, while arch replaced it immediately.

Sadly, the Nix version was almost a year old and also not great.

check here , set the channel to unstable to see the freshest packages

I think Nix packages have similar benefits as immutable distros.

Nix as an external pm has most of the benefits, but almost none of the downsides. It creates an immutable package store, but doesn't cause FHS compliance related issues.