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.
Of the future? They’re a duplicate of what Apple was doing with software as far back as the mid 90s.
Every ounce of performance we squeeze out of our hardware is replaced with pounds of bloat like this.
It’s fine for a utility or something you’ll hardly ever need to use, but running every day software like this is a complete waste.
What do you mean? Apple doesn’t have a package manager at all. Brew is a fucking mess that takes ages to do anything.
There’s no bloat, nix are system packages
If there’s no bloat why is there a garbage collector?
Rollback, reproducibility, safety.
Would you call btrfs snapshots or some other backup system bloat?
It actually serves an important purpose for the user. Meanwhile apt is leaving around random libraries and man pages you need to autoremove.
The garbage collector removes all packages/derivations that are not (transitively) used any more. So it is similar to apt-get autoremove. I don’t think that classifies as bloat. You could just regularly run the garbage collector.