Really? In my experience NixOS is faster than Arch.
edit: this isn't arguing against him, i've heard lots of cases where Arch is indeed faster. For me though, I feel like nixos is faster for my use cases.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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I like the idea of NixOS in theory, but in practice I just don't like the extra level of abstraction when configuring things. I like to know exactly what is happening. I also like to be able to open a man page for a program and just follow what's written in there, which often times I can't do on NixOS because they have their own way of doing things.
In general it just gives me a hacky and "bolted on" vibe.
What I'm more interested in is the package manager, which is use on a non NixOS distro (just "nix shell" alone is so awesome). I use flatpaks and they work well, but I vastly prefer Nix approach, it's so well thought out and I would love if Nix (or something similar) would establish itself as the universal and distro independent package manager. But even here it's lacking, after years and years you still can't use OpenGL or Vulkan in graphical applications without a third party workaround which is crazy to me, how is that not a number one priority to fix?
Nix has a great potential as a replacement for flatpak actually as it is source based. You can guarantee what you are installing is based on which source code by compiling yourself.
Flatpak and the others are packaged by upstream. A developer can put malware in a package and upload it to flathub. That's why it needs permission management, sandboxing etc to minimize the risk.
I like the sandboxing of flatpak not just because of malware but also for proprietary software. But I guess the same could be achieved with Nix + Bubblewrap.
Also the flatpak runtimes are insane to me, atleast the big platforms like "org.gnome.platform". That thing weighs a nice 800mb and is pretty much a full linux install. And while in theory these should be share between programs, you can end up unlucky and have five massive runtimes for 5 different programs (like when i was trying some flatpak programs the other day). That's a nice 4GB of overhead and programs STILL include their own libraries if they are missing in the runtimes...might as well go the windows approach.
Haha yeah. Flatpak is pretty much like having 2 linux systems on your machine at once. And of course it can be worse sometimes.
I only use nixos for my base configuration. All GUI desktop applications are installed through flatpak and development is done through distrobox.
Interesting! Any reason for this choice instead of doing everything through nix?
data intensive
I take it you weren't using flakes?
I was using flakes. I gave the reason why it's data intensive. If a core dependency like glibc is updated, it's hash will change and all packages that depend on it need to be rebuilt and rehashed. It'll download all packages again even though there's minimal change.