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.

    • root@precious.net
      619·
      9 months ago

      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.

          • AgileLizard
            5·
            9 months ago

            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.

          • Shareni@programming.dev
            4·
            9 months ago

            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.

        • root@precious.net
          11·
          9 months ago

          Having every application load their own version of a library into memory is bloat.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
            2·
            9 months ago

            They don’t, they share the same library version if they were built against it.

            Lots of software won’t even work if the library version is different, so it’s a benefit, not a downside

      • excitingburp@lemmy.world
        4·
        9 months ago

        What do you mean? Apple doesn’t have a package manager at all. Brew is a fucking mess that takes ages to do anything.

        • root@precious.net
          1·
          9 months ago

          The applications have binaries and libraries bundled for multiple arches. I wasn’t speaking to the package manager.