Remember the days when everyone and their pet iguana was raving about Arch Linux? You couldn't escape the ever-so-subtle "I use Arch BTW" remarks in every Linux forum. Well, move over, Arch, because NixOS is here to steal your thunder! Nowadays, it seems that you can't browse YouTube or read a blog without stumbling upon someone extolling the virtues of NixOS and how it is the epitome of computing perfection. But hey, who needs critical analysis when we can jump on the hype train and declare NixOS as the new Arch? Because that's exactly what's going on. NixOS has now become the self-proclaimed prodigy that's poised to dethrone Arch Linux as the holy grail of Linux distributions. The time is calling, my friends! It's time for you – the seasoned Linux enthusiast – to dust off your keyboard warrior capes and embark on a new crusade. So, grab your Tux plushie (or, your pitchforks if you belong to the world of devils) and let's embark on an adventure through the enigmatic world of NixOS (and let the memes commence)!
  • lloram239@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    All dependencies and packages go into the /nix/store/ and are shared.

    However you still end up with a lot more bloat than typically, as an upgrade will leave all the old versions behind. This allows you to instantly up & downgrade in case something goes wrong. But it also means you need twice the space. You can of course free the space afterwards, but you still need it for the upgrade.

    Another factor that can lead to bloat is that Nix makes no use of binary compatibility, meaning dependencies are specified down to the individual bits, so a package doesn’t just depend on some thing named libfoo, but on a very specific libfoo with a known sha256 checksum.

    The official packages in nixpkgs will all use the same libfoo, but if you build your own software or install software from other places you can quickly end up with multiple libfoos around (NixOS can still dedup them a little via hardlinks, but still bloat). You can manually override dependencies, but that’s something you have to do manually, there is no automation as far as I can tell (nix build --override-input nixpkgs 'flake:nixpkgs' should get reasonably close)

    This also leads to bigger downloads, as an update to a core library can require updating a large number of upward dependencies.

    Overall I think it’s worth the trade-off, as it gives you much more flexibility, but a typical NixOS install will generally still end up bigger than regular distributions.