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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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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Why aren't more people using NixPKGs? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (1 children)

In terms of the memory usage, it's a reasonable approach these days. It gets hairy when we consider security vulnerabilities. It's far easier to patch one system-wide shared library than to hunt down every single application still bundling a vulnerable version.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The nice thing about Nix/Guix is that each version of a library only needs to be installed once and it wont really be "bundled" with the app itself. So it would be a lot easier to hunt down the packages that are depending on a bad library.